Travel with Prometheus through the magical worlds of ‘Georgia’s Brueghel’, Mamuka ‘Dideba’ Didebashvili at Katrine Levin Galleries. Urban Allusions is on show from 1st – 14th September 2024 with a private view on 3rd September at Katrine Levin Galleries at Marie Jose Gallery,16 Victoria Grove, South Kensington, London W8 5RW, 11am-6pm Monday-Saturday.
Travelling through places – and through life – we perceive the illusions we weave for ourselves in harmony with our moods, memories and aspirations. Dideba’s artworks are fragments of ourselves reflected back at us. Inspired in part by Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, Urban Allusions is structured around a metaphorical journey with Prometheus as our guide.
Surreal
While Dideba’s abstract paintings depict magical cities as an interplay of lightand colour, subtly changing tones and evocative shapes, his portraitpaintings present the cities’ quirky inhabitants who seem to exist outside oftime, their exaggerated forms suggestive of their character and profession.
Where Calvino uses language to contemplate on the nature of humancivilisation through poetic conversations, Mamuka Dideba conjures visualdialogues between past memories and future aspirations. Painting in anelaborate Renaissance technique, the influence of the Old Masters on hispractice is unmistakable. He has been dubbed Georgia’s Brueghel for hishumorous critique of human behaviour and deviation from realistic proportions.
Urban Allusions is the artist’s first solo exhibition in London since 2019.
Mamuka Didebashvili (b. 1968, Tbilisi, Georgia) is affectionately dubbed ‘Georgia’s Brueghel’ because of his deviation from realistic proportions and interest in human behaviour. Dideba paints in the Renaissance imprimatura technique that lights up the paintings from within – a process that requires enormous skill. Widely exhibited, he is a graduate of the Tbilisi State Art Academy.
“My chief goal is to transform the mundane and the realistic into something special and elevated.” (Mamuka ‘Dideba’ Didebashvili.)
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