Polina Berlin Gallery is pleased to announce Novela, an exhibition of paintings by self-taught Georgian artist Parmen Daushvili. On view from February 7 through March 4, 2023, this marks the artist’s first one-person exhibition.

Lithe and loosely rendered, Daushvili’s introspective portraits and atmospheric interiors draw inspiration from his immediate surroundings: the cool, oblique London light that floods his beige and muted green flat; passers-by on his street; acquaintances and members of his immediate family. Architectural details wander from painting to painting, gaining a symbolic gravity as his compositions are subjected to an ever harsher painterly process of reduction.

Daushvili’s paintings are survivors of their own making. Many of his works are over-painted, scraped, sanded, re-painted and transformed. The palette is somber and measured, evoking at times mid 20th century modern British and American masterworks by Milton Avery, LS Lowry and David Hockney. He is economical with his brushwork and the resulting pictures possess a quiet intensity; a sense of yearning and grappling; a hopefulness and uneasiness.

The artist began painting as a pastime in 2003, but chose to be a full time painter after fleeing to the United Kingdom from Tbilisi, Georgia soon after the Russian occupation in 2008. Having foregone the English language in favor of painting, his immediate family members helped him set up a modest presence on social media as a means of making a livelihood by painting portrait commissions. Only very occasionally and most recently has he shared his private works, made solely for himself. These works comprise Novela.

Parmen Daushvili (b. 1970, Tbilisi, Republic of Georgia) lives and works in London. His work has been included in the annual exhibitions of the Royal Society of Portrait Painters, the Royal Society of British Artists and the Royal Academy of Arts Summer Exhibition. He was selected for inclusion in the BP Portrait Award in 2014, 2019 and 2020 at London’s National Portrait Gallery.