Merab abramishvili biography of mahatma

Listen to me carefully, you bunch of snobs, it’s high time we seriously talked about Merab Abramishvili (–), the Georgian artist who transcended the boundaries between tradition and modernity with a boldness most of you, little collectors lost in your contemporary certainties, will probably never fully grasp.

In the post-Soviet cacophony of the s, as Georgia wrestled with the throes of its cultural identity, Abramishvili chose a singular path that would make your video installations look like cheap fairground amusements.

Trained at the Tbilisi Academy of Arts, from which he graduated in , he immersed himself in the depths of medieval Georgian art, not to slavishly copy it like first-year art students would, but to extract its very essence and transmute it into something radically new.

His gesso technique, inspired by the frescoes of Ateni Sioni he studied in his youth alongside his father Guram Abramishvili, was not mere technical reproduction – stop nodding as if you understand,