Irakli Sutidze (1954 - 2024) Exhibition - Museum of Fine Arts
You will have seen his painting if you have been around Georgia
In the Museum of Fine Arts on Rustaveli, opposite parliament, there currently is a retrospective of the works of Irakli Sutidze. Born in 1954, Sutidze died in April of this year.
The paintings are iconic, and you likely will have seen them. Animals and especially horses were among his big interests. Some of the paintings at first glance seem monochrome, and you have to look more closely for its subjects to emerge. Next to animals, he often was interested in symbolic or biblical figures.
Among these paintings, I particularly like the wolf — and his gaze.
Here is the description from the museum about what Sutidze was up to:
“Soft colorfulness, exaggerated objects, incremental civilizational achievements, and sacral and mythological signs highlight the artist's creative language on an abstracted meditative plane, in which realistic figures are hard to pinpoint in relation to time, cultural field, or ethnos.”
Even when not loading his canvas with wide range of colors, Sutidze was rich in detail. It is a bit painful to see also that there is not an English Wikipedia for an artist of his stature.
A friend who knew him says “he was a great guy - a real heart for horses - living in a sprawling aparment with a long shushabandi in a collapsing building in Chugureti, full of all his horse stuff, memorabilia, and studio.”
The exhibition is free, at the Georgian Museum of Fine Arts, open every day except Monday.
The yellow painting is my favourite!