Levan Chogoshvili / Vijay Masharani: Big Casino

Kunsthalle Zürich is delighted to announce new exhibitions by Levan Chogoshvili and Vijay Masharani.

Levan Chogoshvili (b. 1953, lives and works in Tbilisi, Georgia) is among the most important Georgian artists of his generation. Since the 1970s he had created an extensive body of work in Tbilisi which incorporates painting, drawing, film and sculpture. Central to this work is the question of history: how it is essential, particularly for Georgia, and how it is under constant pressure, now more than ever. History is continually expunged or corrupted; artists like Chogoshvili bring it back to life and render it visible. Chogoshvili’s art, which was prohibited in the Soviet Union until well into the 1980s, grapples with this erasure and the contradictory processes behind it. It resists ignorance and stands up to amnesia. For this, for his intellectual and human generosity and his fearless engagement for others, Chogoshvili is very highly regarded by the younger generation of Georgian artists, as an exemplar, teacher and their selfless supporter.

“Whilst I was in Paris, the Soviet Union dissolved, and I found myself without a passport, let alone a curator. As a result, many of my older works were either lost or impossible to retrieve. Even the prize I won at a festival was entrusted to a Soviet jury member, who indignantly remarked, ‘We don’t send invitations to the festivals to Georgia, so how did you Georgians even get here?’” Levan Chogoshvili

Vijay Masharani (b. 1995, lives in New York and Belmont, USA) works with video and drawing. His works test the connections between small gestures and complex systems, asking what forces are at play, and what escapes our perception if we focus solely on details or only see the whole. With patterns that are in a constant state of transmutation, Masharani attempts to analyse this interplay, highlighting the role of the contingent throughout his compositions: across the duration of a video or throughout the production period of a series of drawings. […]

As he moves back and forth between close examination and a broader perspective, he continuously asks the question with his almost meditative works: What am I looking at? This enquiry stems from a desire to investigate the interplay between intuition and deliberation. For his first institutional solo exhibition, Masharani presents a body of work that diagrams a trajectory of a roving practice. His playful approach to permutation and transformation underscores the potential of these dynamics to reveal how structures can evolve and change. (Otto Bonnen.)

The exhibition at Kunsthalle Zürich will be Levan Chogoshvili’s largest to date. Georgian art historian Nana Kipiani has written an extensive introduction to unofficial Georgian art and Chogoshvili’s work for the exhibition; Chogoshvili and Kipiani will be present for the exhibition opening. Levan Chogoshvili’s exhibition is curated by Daniel Baumann, his last at Kunsthalle Zürich; Vijay Masharani’s exhibition is curated by Otto Bonnen.