Art
2023_3
After graduating from the Tbilisi State Academy of Art Faculty of Graphic Art, Niniko Morbedadze worked extensively as a film production designer with such notable Georgian film directors as Mikeil Kobakhidze, Besarion Giorgobiani and Nodar Managadze. Most recently, she collaborated with film director Giga Agladze on “The Other Me” with David Lynch as the executive producer. Her experience in film is evident in her work. Her pieces are snapshots, distinct but infinitely connected parts of a single continuous whole, chronicling an existence on a plane conjured up from her subconscious, intractable and in permanent flux.
Niniko works in acrylic, Indian ink, and pencil on paper and canvas. She is meticulous about composition and gives equal weight to the foreground and background of her pieces. Shadows are important in her work. She often creates dramatic contrasts and uses bold, defined lines.
Niniko Morbedadze’s creative process is one fuelled by the subconscious. In her own words, she describes how her brain creates while her hand brings to life that which exists beyond her conscious self. Niniko Is not one to define her work. She considers this to be restrictive and counterproductive. To Niniko, art explained is no longer art but literature. Freedom of interpretation is essential. There is no philosophy and certainly no symbolism in her work.
Niniko Morbedadze’s works are kept in both private and public collections all around the world. Pieces on paper created at the outset of her career are in the Norton and Nancy Dodge Collection at the Zimmerli Art Museum in New Jersey. She has extensively exhibited in group and solo shows in Georgia and internationally.
Niniko made her international auction debut in the summer of 2020 when her work was successfully sold at the Phillips auction in London. Her works were again sold at Phillips in 2021 and 2023 after her initial success at auction. The Dimitri Shevardnadze National Gallery of Georgia hosts Niniko Morbedadze’s mid-career review show until October 15, 2023. Visitors can view more than 100 works created by the artist between 1989 and 2023.
Particularly worth noting is the collaboration between Niniko Morbedadze and the gallery CH64, which is her representative here and in the world. This relationship started in 2018 and continues to this day.
You’ve seen it somewhere… Not in a dream, more during the foggy moment between sleep and wakefulness. When you know that you are not sleeping, but nothing is clear either, though it seems very real. Even touchable. At that time, it seems that some portal is opening to infinite worlds, the existence of which you cannot deny but cannot
prove either. You just suspect that it’s there.
Niniko Morbedadze is sitting before me – with her long, straight black hair, and the sparkle of her dark eyes. The same eyes that can see beyond, and for which the border of the physical world is so ephemeral, that looking on the other side and stealing visions of another realm is a daily routine.
I won’t ask her to explain her paintings… How could one ask a painter what they meant? It would be the same as asking God what he meant by creating the world.
Yes, I don’t like when they ask me the essence and meaning of my paintings. I even struggle finding titles for them.
What title should one give to a blue panther that is lying before the Hubble telescope and looking at us? This antenna records the sounds of outer worlds, they are real, and their operators periodically tell us that somewhere far in the cosmos, they recorded some harmonious music notes. These are perhaps the notes that started the world. One good author wrote that we were created by music. Then this harmony was derailed by the creator’s first presumptuous son, and we fell. Could this blue panther be precisely that? It’s looking at our prototypes, who are bustling through the flowers or sitting, tired. I don’t know.
It turned out that Niniko doesn’t know herself
I’ve often been told that these characters must be living on some island. In a city. Surrounded by the sea. When they tell me this, I start seeing it myself. The sea is there, there are lakes, mountains. There is both contemporaneity and the Middle Ages. It’s multicultural.
So this means that in order to understand an already finished painting, we need someone else’s comments?
Sometimes, yes. I put my subconscious phobias on canvas. And I need some time to make them conscious.
Was it always the case?
o, I was actually painting very definite things until the academy. Girls, musicians, for instance. Then something happened in my life. Something strange, that completely changed my style.
That’s when you started drawing other worlds? How? Was it a process of trial and error, or did you have the full image in mind and transfer it directly to canvas?
I’m trying to remember… They showed me the drawings of someone who drew with a pen, and I understood that I had to draw with a pen too. And the pen brought these worlds.
So the technique brought them?
Yes, it looks like. Technique and that strange occurrence
Did you see these faces and draw them, or did you reach them through trial and error?
Faces? I don’t know… During my first year at the academy I’ve only drawn two works, both faces. At the time, they were more grotesque…
So it was trial and error?
No, you know what it was, actually? When I was a child, I would see another world and characters, I wanted to be with them, and I was training my imagination to get there. That’s why I see them and paint them.
I think that your wish became a reality, and you crossed the border. You can travel freely between the two worlds.
Yes, when I paint, that’s the case.
What is the music that they play there? Or when you paint here? Something psychedelic?
Art rock. Mainly Yes, Weather Report, McLaughlin…
Mahavishnu Orchestra?
Mahavishnu? Yes, them too.
What I see on the paintings, to me, is more like a blend of Bruegel miniatures from the Middle Ages, and Venetian carnivals.
But artists who were less famous than me have had an influence too. For instance, Stanisław Fijałkowski.
Now I understand that I also feel Germans from the Renaissance…
Yes, Cranach, Durer.
The anxiety found in the seemingly idyllic paintings reminds me of the nervousness of the great Germans. The decorative arabesques on the red clothing worn by two monumental figures going somewhere echo the ornaments on the brocades and velvets of Lucas Cranach’s characters, and rouse a silenced fear at the surface of our hearts. Where are they going, and what do they want? Why are they looking at us? And the large flowers around them aren’t flowers at all. They look more like human souls, barely attached to narrow stems, almost falling from them…
Perhaps the painting is telling us something about the transit of souls, where an open-handed girl is saluting a boat in the water, on which there are some defined and some blurry figures, and it is clear that this girl is not waving goodbye to someone but welcoming them, and this shore will be kind or not so kind, depending on who will put their feet on it.
But it’s not only about the Middle Ages. At the exhibition, I stopped in front of one painting, asking myself where I had seen this very familiar subject, what it was reminding me of. I had the impression of having seen it very recently, and suddenly it hit me. These three saint figures with nimbi and scary rabbit figures, on the front of the painting, who are holding balloons that seem to have been teleported from a painting by Miro, were taken from a scene from a very good TV show, Preacher, in which a priest understands that God was lost, and starts looking for him everywhere, only to find him in Louisiana, under the guise of a Dalmatian dog. Niniko’s canvas produces the same strange mix of despair and loud laughing as watching this film.
I would like to ask you about the colors. This wonderful red that looks so much like our Adishi red, this blue or light blue, where did they come from? Did you add the colors, or did you also see them in this other world?
I see everything bluntly. Then I make a sketch and put it on canvas. I love black and white, and it was difficult to switch to colors. But at some point, I started wanting to work with colors…
Did you know right away that acrylic would be your main tool?
Yes, on canvas, I only work with acrylic. Painting is something else. There are fewer lines there, and shapes are created through lights, shadows, and colors…
The world that you have been putting on canvas for so many years, is it finite? Did you see it, get to know it, and will you go into another one, or will you stay there and will we stay there with you too?
– Because I exist in this world and I am me, I cannot go somewhere else. It doesn’t work like that – to simply finish this world and go somewhere else. This is the imagined creative space where I am and will always remain. Do you know what I would like to tell you? To many, my characters seem strange, but in reality, if we look on the streets, it is they who are walking…
What would you tell me about fear? Many people have told me that your paintings scare them.
I don’t know, I don’t think that they are only scary. They are indeed ambivalent. Like life. We live, we are doing well, but in the back of your head, there is always some fear – the fear of dying, of losing a close one, or simple, untraceable nervousness… When painting, I try to balance the work so that it isn’t too heavy or too sweet… I try to make it approximately as life is in reality…
