For some, history is lifeless. Like a fossilized dinosaur bone, it lies deep beneath the ground of the present. For others, history is alive and unruly, something that cannot be buried. Like lava, it pushes its way to the surface, spilling into the now. In the art of Levan Chogoshvili, such an understanding of history can be experienced both sensorially and intellectually.
Chogoshvili’s recent retrospective, the largest of its kind to date and including some forty works from 1973 through the present, offered captivating insights into the oeuvre of the Georgian artist. The exhibition included paintings, collages, works on paper, silk-screen prints, moving images (projections and monitors), and historic photographs from the artist’s collection. All revolve around the history of his homeland, from the mixed-media collage painting The Murder of Zurab Eristavi, 1973–2003, recalling events of the seventeenth century, andthe tempera-and-collage-on-paper The Swiss Border, 1984, which refers to Georgia’s nineteenth-century reputation as Eastern Europe’s “little Switzerland.” Other works reflect on the twentieth-century totalitarian Soviet system in which Chogoshvili, born in 1953, grew up. Refusing to conform to the state-sanctioned style of socialist realism, he was limited to presenting his allegedly bourgeois art in private apartment exhibitions.
Many of his works from that period bespeak the ingenious ways Eastern European neo-avant-garde artists circumvented state censorship. The depictions of families and other groups in the series “Destroyed Aristocracy,” 1970–86, which includes works on paper and canvas, for example, are related to the Soviet regime’s control over private family photographs. Zealous in their mission to create “the new man,” the collectivists sought to erase personal histories and memories, especially when they included “enemies of the people”—and nearly every family had at least one. Many people destroyed family photos out of fear of the secret police. By translating private family photographs into abstracted, expressive painterly forms and collages, Chogoshvili offered families—who often commissioned those works—a less risky substitute.
The tempera painting Venus and Mar(x)s (Politburo), 1986, addresses the Soviet Union’s ban on prostitution. Chogoshvili combined abstracted, distorted portraits of Politburo members with erotic depictions of women from French magazines. Despite the official prohibition, prostitution, like religion, continued to exist in the socialist paradise. When I interviewed Chogoshvili during the exhibition’s installation, he recalled that, for him, “everything that was forbidden was art.” He saw his practice as “historical, political, aesthetic, conceptual protest.” The collage series“1924,” 1984–2024, recalls the Bolshevik executions of the Georgian nobility and intelligentsia that took place that year. For Chogoshvili, this was above all an extermination of “spiritual aristocracy.” And it was in this spirit that, after the fall of the Iron Curtain, he continued to document cultural traditions and customs in Eastern Europe that had been suppressed by the Soviets or relegated to folklore—aware that the violence was only on pause.
Roman, Persian, Byzantine, and Russian influences, the Armenian, Sarmatian, and German legacies, the Communist period and the post-Communist era of neoliberal consumerism—everything that shapes Georgia’s hybrid history flows into Chogoshvili’s motifs and styles. What may appear to be an embrace of Western modernist abstraction can simultaneously be a nod to Georgia’s ancient Christian cave art. His holistic approach to history contrasts with that of others who focus only on select chapters serving specific identity groups. Chogoshvili’s art transcends particular histories and the identities associated with them precisely by including them all. His work is a gesture of resistance against both the authoritarian disgust toward the multitude and the totalitarian impulse to eradicate everything that does not fit a purist doctrine—an impulse that many Eastern Europeans still feel breathing down their necks.
