Vernissage Gallery invites you on October 22, 2012, at 17:00 to the 27th solo exhibition of the renowned Georgian artist, one of the distinguished representatives of the generation of the 1980s- Jemal Kukhalashvili.

This exhibition is far from ordinary, as it coincides with the artist’s 60th anniversary. Kukhalashvili has dedicated this exhibition—“He Who Created the World”- to the great Shota Rustaveli and to the 300th anniversary of the printed edition of his immortal poem “The Knight in the Panther’s Skin.”

The title of the exhibition is not accidental. “He Who Created the World”…—the eternal question of humanity, with a single immutable answer: God, the creator and sustainer of the universe. When one has devoted years not to the accumulation of time, but to sacrifice on the altar of art, one inevitably—willingly or not—returns to origins, to that which is most authentic and pure within oneself. One aspires toward it as part to whole, as fragment to entirety, as the accidental to the inevitable—thus justifying one’s very existence in this world.

Each exhibition by Jemal Kukhalashvili is marked by difference and by the pursuit of the new and the elevated. His work is known across numerous countries, including the United States, England, France, Italy, Spain, Germany, Russia, and others.

As the noted critic Davit Andriadze observes:
“Kukhalashvili is wholly expended in his творчество, and thus is capable—like Goethe’s ‘beautiful moments’—of arresting the trivial, breaking through the routine of ‘normality,’ and capturing fleeting phantasms. Kukhalashvili is an expert of the instantaneous flash and of delight in that instant: in the historical—the poetic, in the momentary—eternity.”

This exhibition is also significant in that the artist presents to the public a new collection of poetry: “Me Ara” (“Not I”).

“Kukhala is not a painter who writes poetry… nor, moreover, a poet who paints…
He is an artist equally engaged in both ‘practices’—in painting and in language alike; in both, gesture is his guide” (D. Andriadze).

“The path toward the zenith, I thought, was my mother’s braid,” writes the artist in one of his poems—and for sixty years now, with characteristic persistence and resolve, he has sought to conquer the uncharted peaks of art.

A man who comes from a childhood “stung and scarred by nettles,” who kindles the shimmer of the cross in mud, who passes through the eye of the needle of beauty; a master of painterly celebrations, a giver rather than a receiver, childlike in sincerity and openness, original and singular, surpassing the present in both thought and mastery—he is an artist of the future.

A laureate of numerous international competitions and recipient of Grand Prix awards, he is no longer surprised by honors. For him, a single powerful brushstroke and a suddenly cast phrase are the highest titles. And above all, the primary dominant remains—the human being.

“Why did I come to love you, human,
Or why did you teach me so much sorrow,”

writes the artist. It is precisely this human love that sustains him and enables the creation of that great art which is called the painting and poetry of Jemal Kukhalashvili.