Tamo Jugeli
...lightly
April 18 - May 20, 2023
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Polina Berlin Gallery is pleased to present …lightly, an exhibition of new paintings by Georgian artist Tamo Jugeli. On view from April 18 through May 20, 2023, this marks the artist’s second solo exhibition at the gallery.
The show takes its title from the text of Aldous Huxley’s poem, “Island”:
So throw away your baggage and go forward.
There are quicksands all about you, sucking at your feet,
trying to suck you down into fear and self-pity and despair.
That’s why you must walk so lightly.As a self-taught artist, Jugeli is utterly self-possessed, resisting allusion. Jugeli has created an idiom all her own—one that pushes beyond symbols and narrative to carve out her own sense of self in space. Her compositions are lyrical, figures are fortuitous, never preconceived. Her work is at once immediately recognizable yet totally inscrutable. Forgoing themes, Jugeli commits herself to a practice driven by instinct. Jugeli aligns herself with wrist and body painters, oscillating between large and small scale paintings, figuration and abstraction. The show consists of 12 paintings, some on board, some on canvas, each one an exploration of color and form that Jugeli creates without preparatory work.
Her painting is propulsed by spontaneity, and a sort of Apollonian creation that recalls Rainer Maria Rilke’s Sonnets to Orpheus, in which a tree of sound stuns and awes with its unheralded appearance. No introduction is necessary; the connection to the viewer is instant and primal. And, as in the Rilke poems, figures do appear in sudden, scattershot fashion—a vaguely animal figure, or a mysterious statue on a plinth—their meaning as obscure to the creator as their presence is obvious to their audience. Jugeli’s paintings record a sort of transmission as involuntary as it is devoid of guile or agenda.
As she put it: “Process is my high, not the result.” Rather than leaning towards full abstraction or figurative moments, she strives for a playful golden medium of “suggestions of shapes—showing something but not fully.” She revels in that tease. For the same reason, she forgoes titles, finding them precious. However, she allows for the possibility that “maybe over time [she] will connect or reconnect” with the original impulse behind a painting and that might yield a title.
For Jugeli, painting was born of a raw instinct. Having spent some time in New York over the past year where she has set up a temporary studio, Jugeli is a native of Georgia born shortly after the collapse of the Soviet Union. She did not take up her artistic practice until she was in her early 20s, while making a living as a journalist and editor. Working through a tough period, she started to draw therapeutically, on her own. As she gave into her instinct toward gesture and creation, she felt alive. Once she transitioned to oil paints, she became better able to mediate the process that overtook her, and saw her painting practice as a form of thinking, heeding Rilke’s famous dictum: “Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror. Just keep going. No feeling is final.”
Jugeli does not feel a Georgian influence comes across in the paintings, but is certain her childhood spent there is why she paints. Although the USSR had collapsed a few years prior to her birth, she found her existence clouded by a persistent claustrophobia, and a severe restriction of movement. As a child and teenager, she dreamed of finding a way out to have an identity that was simply human, and not marked by a place she longed to leave. She cultivated a vibrant internal life and sees her maturation as a matter of coming out of that self, letting instinct be her teacher and exploding outward into her artistic practice.
Jugeli’s paintings trace the dance steps between abstraction, figuration, and transcendence. This transcendental urge speaks to a sort of perseverance, a faith that there is something on the other side, and a need to keep oneself pushing forward to whatever that may be—identity, revelation, or simply the strength to endure. As Huxley closed out his poem
Lightly my darling,
on tiptoes and no luggage,
not even a sponge bag,
completely unencumbered. -
Tamo Jugeli (b. 1994, Tbilisi, Georgia) lives and works in New York and Tbilisi. Jugeli’s work has been included in exhibitions at the Hill Art Foundation (New York), Gallery Artbeat (Tbilisi), TBC Concept (Tbilisi) and Svaneti Museum of History and Ethnography (Mestia, Georgia), among others.
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Born
Tbilisi, Georgia 1994. Lives and works in New York, NY
Education
2017 | BSS, David Aghmashenebeli University of Georgia, Tbilisi, GE
One-Person Exhibitions
2025 (forthcoming) Gladstone Gallery, Brussels, BE
Hey, Karma, Los Angeles, CA (1/11-2/13)2024 A Clear Horizon, Tanya Leighton Gallery, Berlin, DE (9/9-11/9)
2023 …lightly, Polina Berlin Gallery, New York, NY (4/18-5/20)
2022 Random Order, Gallery Artbeat, Tbilisi, GE (2/12-3/27)
Solitaire, Polina Berlin Gallery, New York, NY (5/3-6/4)2021 Limen (with Nina Kintsurashvili), Svaneti Museum of History and Ethnography, Mestia, GE (6/5-7/25)
2020 Unnamed 2020, Gallery Artbeat, Tbilisi, GE (8/07-9/20)
2019 You Know What?! I don’t Have a Good Feeling about Cakes Around Here, Gallery Artbeat, Tbilisi, GE (2/21-4/7)
2018 Archetypes, Art | Up – Street Gallery, Batumi, GE
Selected Group Exhibitions
2025 Itchy Bloom, Ruttkkowski 68, Düsseldorf, DE (3/30-6/29)
2024 A Particular Kind of Heaven, Karma, Thomaston, ME (7/21-9/1)
The rose is the rose and is the cat, Polina Berlin Gallery, New York, NY (6/4-8/2)
Figment: Tamo Jugeli and Maia Naveriani, Gallery Artbeat, Tbilisi, GE (4/11-6/16)
My Sister Named…, L'Atlas Gallery, Paris, France, organized with Gallery Artbeat, Tbilisi, GE (3/22-5/24)
Emotional Intelligence II, Polina Berlin Gallery, New York, NY (2/22-3/27)2023 I Was Only Dreaming (curated by Tony Cox),Club Rhubarb, New York, NY (12/1/23-1/28/24)
Soft Focus: Jessica Cannon, Parmen Daushvili, Tamo Jugeli, Carrie Rudd (curated by Polina Berlin),superzoom, Paris, FR (6/29-7/31)
Beautiful, Vivid, Self-Contained (curated by David Salle), Hill Art Foundation, New York, NY (4/21-7/31)2022 Unsafe at Any Speed, Morton St. Partners, New York, NY (3/15-5/8)
Emotional Intelligence, Polina Berlin Gallery, New York, NY (2/22-4/23)2021 Digital Natives, TBC Concept, Tbilisi, GE (10/28-12/28)
2019 Handler, Gallery Artbeat, Tbilisi, GE (6/1-8/25)
Awards, Fellowships and Residencies
2023 Residency, superzoom, Ardèche, France
2022 Residency, Art Athina, Athens, Greece
2019 Residency, Institut für Alles Mögliche, Berlin, Germany
2018 Residency, Art Villa Garikula, Garikula, Georgia
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