George Abramidze
George Abramidze makes ordinary things come alive. Working from Tbilisi, the ancient capital of the Republic of Georgia, he moves between surreal figuration and pure abstraction — dreamlike fish, abstract canvases, scenes of Georgian life, and the series he’s best known for: the “dancing houses” of his hometown. He takes the crooked old houses of Tbilisi, with their carved balconies and centuries of leaning into one another, and gives them feeling — they have moods and friendships, they dance and lean and drink, and still they hold their form. The affinity with Niko Pirosmani — the beloved painter on Georgia’s one-lari note — is his own rather than a comparison: he made a work titled after Pirosmani in 1989, at the very start of his career.
Alongside the paintings runs a second practice. Since 1989 Abramidze has built compositions from salvaged musical instruments, clock mechanisms, typewriter parts, doll limbs and bicycle wheels — a bassoon becomes a giraffe, a cello becomes a torso, and in some works the mechanisms still run and sound. He calls the method concordance, after the alphabetical index that explains a text word by word. A Georgian critic wrote in 2000 that he “takes great pleasure in using objects found by chance,” resurrected “with an entirely new aesthetic meaning”; a Russian critic in 2007 called him “a born rag-and-bone man.”
Born in Tbilisi in 1966, Abramidze came to painting through design: he studied interior and environmental design at the Kharkiv State Institute of Arts in Ukraine from 1988 to 1991, then graduated from the Tbilisi State Academy of Arts in 1993. He has exhibited since 1989 across Georgia, Germany, Greece, the Netherlands, Turkey, Russia, Spain, Azerbaijan and the Czech Republic, and lived and worked in Berlin. The Georgian National Museum has given him two personal exhibitions at its Tbilisi History Museum in the historic Karvasla building — Concordance Ark in 2011, which filled the halls with up to fifty large compositions, and Dependence in 2013. Of his recent City of Love series, he says the modern world has lost “this lightness, tenderness, genuine sincerity, subtlety, and ease” — which his paintings try to bring back.
George Abramidze holds a special place at Art House SF: he was the very first artist the gallery represented, discovered on a 2018 trip to Tbilisi. Art House SF is proud to bring his surreal, colorful world — from dancing houses to dreaming fish — to collectors across America.
RECOGNITION:
- Two personal exhibitions at the Georgian National Museum, Tbilisi History Museum (Karvasla) — 2011 and 2013
- BBK — Bundesverband Bildender Künstlerinnen und Künstler (Federal Association of Artists, Germany), member
- Artists’ Union of Georgia, member
- International Federation of Artists (UNESCO), member
- Graduate, Tbilisi State Academy of Arts (1993)
- Kharkiv State Institute of Arts, Ukraine — Faculty of Interior and Equipment (1988–1991)
- Selected by jury, Man — Creator of Perestroika, inter-republic poster competition; exhibited Kyiv, Chișinău and Minsk, 1989 (catalogue)
PRESS AND MEDIA:
- Märkische Allgemeine, Potsdam — “Kunst als Sprache der Welt”, KD Grote, 11 January 1999
- Sakartvelos Respublika (Georgia’s state newspaper) — “Seven”, Giorgi Laliashvili, 9 June 2000
- Vsluh.ru, Tyumen — “The Monmartre Artists in Tyumen”, Irina Permyakova, 15 August 2007
- Akhali Taoba, Tbilisi — on Concordance Ark at the Georgian National Museum, Eka Iremashvili, 12 May 2011
SELECTED EXHIBITIONS:
- 2026 — City of Love, solo exhibition, Art House SF, San Francisco, USA
- 2024 — Wish Fish, solo exhibition, Art House SF, San Francisco, USA
- 2013–14 — Dependence, personal exhibition, Georgian National Museum, Tbilisi History Museum (Karvasla), Tbilisi
- 2021 — Happy Houses, solo exhibition, Art House SF, San Francisco, USA (gallery’s inaugural artist)
- 2011 — Concordance Ark, personal exhibition, Georgian National Museum, Tbilisi History Museum (Karvasla), Tbilisi
- 2009 — Philosophy of Beauty, Tyumen Drama Theatre, Russia; and Gallery of Contemporary Art, Tyumen
- 2007 — Two-artist museum exhibition, Tyumen Museum of Fine Arts, Russia
- 2003 — International exhibitions, Berlin, Germany, and Ankara, Turkey
- 1999 — 5 Künstler / 3 Nationen, Galerie R Atelier, Potsdam-Babelsberg, Germany
- 1994 — International Federation of Artists (IFA) exhibition, Moscow
- 1989–2004 — Numerous group and international exhibitions across Georgia, Ukraine (Kyiv), Germany, Greece, the Netherlands, Turkey, and Azerbaijan
COLLECTIONS:
George Abramidze’s work is held by the Natela Iankoshvili House Museum in Tbilisi and Samtskhe-Javakheti State University in Akhaltsikhe, and in private collections in Georgia, Azerbaijan, Armenia, Lithuania, Turkey, Russia, Slovakia, Greece, Spain, France, China, Germany and the United States — including, through Art House SF, private collectors across sixteen U.S. states, from California and New York to Illinois, Texas and Pennsylvania.
31 artworks
31 artworks
