Artists

Tolia Astakhishvili

Press release

In air around things, Tolia Astakhishvili’s first exhibition at LC Queisser in Cologne, the openness of the exhibition space comes into focus within its intricate and compartmentalised architecture. Where her installations often accumulate, alter, or occupy the architecture around them, here attention shifts to the volume between things to air as an omnipresent placeholder. This relationship between what is present and what is left open continues in Tolia Astakhishvili’s paintings. Marks and bodies emerge across thin canvas, partially worked from both front and reverse, creating a sense of depth from within the material itself. The fragile figures lean into one another, forming moments of closeness, inwardness and containment. Yet this intimacy is never entirely stable: faces lose their contours, hands and limbs become uncertain, and bodies drift apart, as though proximity itself were temporary. This sense of fragmentation continues in the works on paper, which form a sequence following the staircase through all three floors of the exhibition space. Beginning with cut-outs of found images, they become seeds from which a memory, an observation or a thought might grow. Alongside these works, different objects inhabit the space, among them a model of an unfinished concrete building skeleton, a recurring structure in Tolia Astakhishvili’s work. Consisting only of the initial concrete framework of a building, such structures define architectural volumes without enclosing them: rooms are suggested, but remain open to the air. This tension between the frame, volume and open space runs throughout the exhibition, drawing attention to what is often left unnoticed, the space things hold within and around them. Text by LC Queisser and Nutsa Sitchinava