A non-profit charitable foundation dedicated to popularizing Georgian art and culture, ATINATI operates as both a media platform- ATINATI.COM and a Cultural Center.
One of ATINATI’s main directions is the expansion of its collection of artwork, which is currently in its fifth year and already includes over 2000 pieces. The ATINATI Private Collection includes works created in various media, which offer a vivid picture of Georgian art’s continuous growth, from Modernism to the present day.
The ATINATI Cultural Center’s latest exhibition ‘ATINATI COLLECTION’ presents works created in various mediums by two distinguished, contemporary Georgian artists—Andro Wekua and Thea Djorjadze—from the ATINATI Private Collection.
Thea Djorjadze
Thea Djorjadze was born in Tbilisi, Georgia, in 1971. She studied at the Tbilisi State Academy of Arts, and later at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf.
She currently lives and works in Germany. Her artwork is characterized by diverse forms of sculpture and installation.
Djorjadze often works with a variety of materials: textiles, wood, glass, plaster, and metal. By combining these different materials, she creates forms that are both delicate and powerful. Her works, often minimalist and abstract, carry a strong emotional and poetic resonance. Motifs of impermanence, temporality and fragility are often found. Her art explores space, time, memory and cultural identity.
Thea Djordjadze’s art is often seen as a space of borders and intercultural dialogue. Her work is deeply connected to Western contemporary art, while also carrying traces of post-Soviet experience and personal memory.
The work consists of a thin metal structure used to form a light, minimalist frame. A soft, yellowish-cream fabric is inserted into the frame, appearing to have been randomly folded and rolled. The composition blends a strict geometry and an organically soft form. The use of soft material creates the sensation that the work is in constant flux, as if it could fall apart or be replaced at any time. This feeling of transience and incompleteness is common in Djorjadze’s work.
The metal structure is associated with solidity, and the foam with a sense of vulnerability: a union that presents the coexistence of opposite states. It does not have an obvious narrative, but it nonetheless evokes emotional associations: it can be imagined as a fragment of an internal space, a trace of a body, or an abstract object that combines the existential and the abstract.
The work can also be perceived as an artifact of personal space, where the soft material resembles the body or an everyday object, and the minimalist frame the architectural frame of the space.
Thea Djorjadze’s abstract sculpture expresses a sense of transience, vulnerability and contrast. By combining soft and hard elements, the artist creates an abstract yet emotionally charged object that can be considered as a combination of body, space and memory.
Andro Wekua
Andro Wekua was born in Sokhumi, Georgia, in 1977. Producing multifaceted pieces that include painting, sculpture, video art, installation and graphics, Wekua is one of the most famous Georgian contemporary artists in today’s international art scene.
He spent his childhood and youth in Abkhazia, but after the war in the 1990s, he was forced to leave Sokhumi with his family. This traumatic experience is often reflected in his work. He studied at the Tbilisi Academy of Arts, and, later, in Basel, Switzerland.
Andro Wekua’s art stands at the intersection of personal trauma and collective memory. His characters are often transparent, dreamlike figures—half-realistic, half-imaginary. He works in a plethora of media, creating life-size sculptures, painted abstractions, and cinematic videos.
His works are on the one hand deeply intimate, and on the other deal with universal themes: war, displacement, time. His style is often described as “melancholic surrealism”—with spaces and figures merging in reality and dream.
This aluminum sculpture, painted with acrylic, depicts a magnolia branch. The magnolia, which once flourished in Wekua’s childhood city of Sokhumi, becomes a symbolic element in his sculpture—preserving the world he lost in his youth. The work embodies the absence of familiar places and memories, and serves as a nostalgic icon of a vanished past.
In it, Wekua combines personal nostalgia with the archaic symbolism of nature. At glance a simple flower, it becomes a metaphor for a lost homeland, the impermanence of time, and the continuity of life.
The sculpture features a girl sitting on a wolf’s back. She is depicted with a calm, almost emotionless look, and the wolf as a strong, darkly symbolic figure. It is an image from a fairytale scene—one that is simultaneously connected to the world of childhood, mythology, and the subconscious. As in other works by Wekua, here, too, the boundary between reality and the imaginary is felt.
For Wekua, the wolf is associated with both danger and natural force, while the girl is a symbol of peace; a weak being. Their unity shows the simultaneous coexistence of man and nature, weakness and strength.
As said, the themes of war and lost homeland are often present in Wekua’s work, and here, too, we can see the vulnerability of man in relation to a violent environment.
This work can be considered a metaphor for the confrontation between man and the forces surrounding him. The girl on the wolf seems to carry the combined weight of personal stories, nostalgia, and collective myths.
As in Wekua’s other works, this film creates an intense and charged space, where time is suspended between past and the future. The film extends the visual language Wekua has cultivated over the years: house, landscape, interior, animal, figure, face, car. These motifs intertwine and ultimately create a woven work of spiritual landscapes. Like fragments from memory, they show a unity of places, memories, feelings, fears, and traumas deeply embedded in the subconscious, generating a special emotional charge.
We can describe this video as a visualization of memory, seeing Wekua’s personal stories transformed into a collective memory where reality and imagination intertwine.
In the film, we see the influence of the artist’s childhood—the city of Sokhumi, and the years spent in Tbilisi. We can also see how Georgia was affected by the civil war. All this, Wekua combines with Western tinges. Here, East and West meet not as clear contradictions, but in a complex and intricate unity.
In this film, Wekua creates an emotionally powerful mood with minimalist methods. Realistic images, people, animals, objects, and places are featured in generalized time and space. The climax of the film is a palm tree engulfed in flames. Here, the palm tree appears to us as a metaphor of Wekua’s childhood home, Abkhazia, which finally transforms into a statue and a symbol of eternity.
By Team GT
