Karlo Kacharava – Sentimental Traveller

S.M.A.K. is pleased to present a new exhibition devoted to the poet, art critic, and artist Karlo Kacharava – one of the most influential Georgian artists of the late twentieth century. In his lifetime, Kacharava produced a major body of work that has always resisted ready categorisation; Sentimental Traveller offers a new perspective on some of his most important works, many of which belong to the Karlo Kacharava Estate in Tbilisi, Georgia. A polyphonic museum for contemporary art and artists, S.M.A.K. features the production of culture in its most diverse forms, presenting with this substantial exhibition an artist from a region located at the boundary of Eastern Europe and West Asia who created art that breaks the categories of the Western canon. 

From his student years studying art history at Tbilisi State Academy of Arts, Karlo Kacharava’s (1964-1994) practice included painting, art criticism, and poetry. Drawing inspiration from everyday life in Georgia, his contemporaries, music, poetry, cinema, and art history in the Caucasian region, Kacharava overturned traditional Euro-American art historical canons and narratives, developing his own innovative approach. He was a member of various groups throughout his life, and he routinely collaborated with other artists. Kacharava’s short life ultimately left an enduring mark on Georgia’s vibrant cultural scene, inspiring a whole new generation of local artists for whom he was a prominent source of information. Kacharava was born when his native Georgia was part of the Soviet Union and died in the early years of its independence. He provided an artistic response, emphasising cultural connections rather than rigid divides —  a philosophy with value far beyond Georgia.

Characterised by a tension between the depth of critical thinking he fostered and the apparent neo-Expressionist aesthetic he used, Kacharava’s most famous works include numerous paintings, works on paper, and illustrated diaries. Although he was only thirty years old when he passed away, Kacharava also left behind volumes of poetry, art criticism, and cultural commentary, not to mention the legacy of a unique style that helped usher in a new wave of Georgian avant-garde expression. Throughout his career, in increasingly complex and refined artistic, poetic, and critical systems and constellations, he developed the themes of the portrayal of human figures, quotes and dedications, storytelling, family relationships, urban scenes, landscapes, references, and poetry.

Running across S.M.A.K.’s ground floor galleries, Sentimental Traveller opens up Kacharava’s “inventive visual world” to a much wider audience. Alongside a large selection of paintings and works on paper, archival material punctuates the exhibition, including photographs by Guram Tsibakhashvili and a continual projection of an archival documentary video featuring Karlo Kacharava. These rich constellations are displayed as sequences of different bodies of work in an immersive environment with a methodology inspired by Kacharava’s use of the storyboard and unique modes of storytelling, providing a deeper understanding of the international aspects of his oeuvre and activities. The exhibition follows the trajectory of Karlo Kacharava’s travels, between Tbilisi, Cologne, Madrid, Paris, Berlin, and Moscow, identifying and deconstructing the chronological development of his oeuvre according to its major themes.

Karlo Kacharava was especially interested in how individual subjectivity is shaped by familial, political, and institutional power structures within Georgian society. He never ceased to point to the role of the artist, the poet, and the art critic, and how these figures appear or disappear. A true visionary, Kacharava would have continued to explore notions that remain so relevant to our contemporary time: collective and individual memory, gender relations, social classes, political and democratic demands, as well as freedom of speech. Belief systems in cultures around the world include the notion that a human spirit prevails beyond death. Kacharava’s spirit continues to exercise its influence, especially on younger generations of artists, art historians, and – more broadly – citizens in Georgia and beyond.  It is the enduring, irrepressible presence of Karlo Kacharava’s spirit that permeates this exhibition.

Karlo Kacharava: Sentimental Traveller is curated by Liesje Vandenbroeck and Karima Boudou, and is Kacharava’s first museum solo exhibition outside Georgia. S.M.A.K. initiates the exhibition in collaboration with the Estate of Karlo Kacharava and Irina Popiashvili, a Tbilisi-based curator, art historian, and Dean Of Visual Art, Architecture, and Design School at the Free University. The exhibition will begin at S.M.A.K. in Ghent in the winter of 2023 and will run through the spring of 2024. Karlo Kacharava: Sentimental Traveller is accompanied by a catalogue raisonné of Karlo Kacharava’s paintings (1978-1994) which will be published by S.M.A.K. in 2024, as well as a dynamic public programme bringing different generations and diasporas of Georgian artists and thinkers into dialogue with Kacharava’s work. 

The exhibition is organised in the context of europalia georgia and close collaboration with the Estate of Karlo Kacharava and Irena Popiashvili. With the support of Modern Art, London.