Beyond Credit

About

Art in General is pleased to announce the inaugural exhibition at its new ground floor gallery at 145 Plymouth Street in Dumbo, Brooklyn, opening on January 30, 2016. The exhibition Beyond Credit is presented in partnership with the Center of Contemporary Art in Tbilisi, Georgia, as part of Art in General’s acclaimed International Collaborations program.

This exhibition features the work of five Georgian artists who are highly regarded internationally but relatively unknown in the United States. Beyond Credit seeks to explore the artist’s process, as a mixture of modes involving rational thinking, intuition, contradiction, accident, mistake, and absurdity, all of which serve as the building blocks for not only their artistic practices, but also their lives. The show aims to investigate the artist’s condition as one who is trained as a “professional creative,” and how that creativity often infuses the habits, structure, and trajectory of their individual paths. What does it mean to live a life in a state of unbroken creativity, detecting inspiration and art everywhere and at all times? The notion of “credit” in this context suggests the status and position of artists in relation to over commercialized and monetized aspects of art as products. Beyond Credit attempts to not only present finished pieces authored by the five artists on view, but rather to show evidence of five lives as the result of their ongoing creative processes, and to consider these lives as continuous, unfolding artworks themselves.

Art in General’s International Collaborations program provides emerging artists abroad with the opportunity to create and present new work in New York, introducing audiences to exciting artists from regions of the world that are otherwise underrepresented in the U.S. Through this collaborations program, Art in General offers similar opportunities to New York-based artists to present works at international partner institutions.

Thea Gvetadze has studied at the Tbilisi State Academy of Arts, the Gerrit Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam, and the Düsseldorf Art Academy. Her paintings have been shown in numerous exhibitions, including the Georgian pavilion of the 50th Venice Biennale, the Museum Kunst Palast in Düsseldorf in 2005, and the Kunsthalle Zürich in 2008. Featured in the 2015 installation At Home With Good Ideas for the Pulse Art Fair, New York, Gvetadze presented a series of ceramic works that explore domestic customs of Georgian life.

Mamuka Japharidze currently lives and works in Shindisi, Georgia, and also spends time in the UK. Japharidze works across a broad range of mediums, including public happenings, archived images, video, photography, drawing, sculpture, and sound works. His practice is often inspired by natural surroundings within the context of Tbilisi. In the 2014 exhibition Re: Museum at the Georgian National Museum, Japharidze presented Media’s Garden, a mixed media installation of indigenous plant life and video projections of dense local forests which have a mystical history. Japharidze was selected to represent Georgia at the 48th Venice Biennale.

Nika Machaidze (also known by the pseudonyms Nikakoi and Erast) is a Georgian video artist, film director, and musician. Machaidze studied animation and film direction at the Shota Rustaveli Theatre Institute in Tbilisi. He has worked as a writer, director, composer and editor for Georgian television. Under the name Nikakoi, Machaidze produces a type of electronic music with references to Georgian folk music. He has won numerous awards, including the grand-prix at the Paris Electronic Music Festival in 1999.

Gio Sumbadze is a Georgian multimedia artist living in Tbilisi. His practice encompasses collage, graphic design, photography, sculpture, and video installation. Sumbadze’s artworks focus on architecture and the structure of natural forms, and specifically architectural planning that mirrors or confronts nature. Sumbadze represented Georgia at the 55th Venice Biennale in 2013 in which he created a “parasitic” addition onto an existing Venetian building titled Kamikaze Loggia, referencing the common practice of extending pre-existing structures in Georgia. He is a graduate of the Tbilisi State Academy of Arts.

Nino Sekhniashvili is an artist based in Tbilisi, Georgia. She is a graduate of the Tbilisi State Academy of Arts and studied fine arts with Rosemarie Trockel at the Art Academy Düsseldorf as well as graphic design at the Art Academy of Tiflis. Sekhniashvili has attended numerous artistic residencies including the Helsinki International Artist Programme (HIAP) in Finland. In her often conceptual work, she uses varied mediums and primarily focuses on the notion of identity. Sekhniashvili is a founder of Gallery Nectar, an exhibition and performance space in Tbilisi.

Wato Tsereteli is an artist, curator, and creative administrator. He is the founder of Center of Contemporary Art in Tbilisi. The CCA Tbilisi operates as an exhibition space and academic institution offering an alternative, affordable Master’s program for artists and arts professionals. Tsereteli has curated and taken part in numerous exhibitions in Georgia and internationally, including the 53rd Venice Biennale. He holds a MA from the department of Photography at the Academy of Fine Arts, Antwerp, Belgium.