Unwheeled

About

The fact that I draw from memory sometimes makes me feel like I dreamt it all.  Maia Naveriani.

His works are always about the relations between artist, artwork, observer... Gia doubts his role while still playing it. This can be seen in his every step.  Ulrich Krempel

Tamara K.E. makes our own, long familiar media world appear as an impenetrable mystery.  Boris Groys

Edzgveradze, K.E. and Naveriani make work about meaning: the meaning of images, of signs, of language, of 'the cultural forest', which, as Naveriani says, fascinates because it is impenetrable. And about the 'human theatre' — they all see all art, including painting, as performative.

They have known each other since the 1980s. They left Georgia around the time of the fall of the Berlin Wall, K.E. and Edzgveradze to Germany and Naveriani to the UK. They have remained close and still in a sense represent a group — as they once really did, when in the 1980s Edzgveradze formed a number of artists around him into the 'Everything is Alright' group. They have all had success on the continent, and Tamara in the US, but have been little exhibited here in the UK. This is an opportunity to see their work as well as an exhibition-reunion of the three artists. Unwheeled has in this aspect of their reunion in London a little of the road-movie about it.

Seductive motifs and surfaces quickly reveal an uneasy meditation on the contemporary world and its representation. Irony and realism mix: they have all kept their sense of humour — alongside prodigious technical skill and an inexhaustible ability to change tack, in both technique and content, while still remaining the same artists, with the same concerns.

Their new work, to be shown in Unwheeled, is different again to previous series. Edzgveradze has made a series of collages dedicated to Friedrich — an artist whose paintings, as historian Mareike Hennig says, 'opened up an abyss.' K.E's new 'Run' series uses the symbols of the sign language alphabet to quote Antonin Artaud. She likes the fact that these quotations are for most people unreadable, that this 'secret information' risks baffling the viewer, or demands commitment. One might see this as a metaphor for the approach of all three artists. With extreme self-confidence, they sometimes deliberately mask their profound experience and thinking—though it is always there to see.