Elene Chantladze’s drawings and paintings inhabit a dual space, grounded in ordinary stuff of everyday life as well as reflecting a highly subjective representation of lived experience. Her approach to image-making is layered, accreted with meaning through both the materials she uses and how she synthesizes personal history, literature, local custom, and global events into her fantastic tableaux. The range of media she employs — from traditional paint and charcoal to more unconventional materials like kerosene and berry juice, as well as natural elements such as stone and manmade detritus including paper plates and plastic lids — not only speaks to the primary relationship of Chantladze’s being in the world, but also to the deep compulsion of the artist to create something from anything. Equally inspired by the surface differentiations on a rock found by the riverbank as in the stains and marks on the discarded scraps on which she draws and paints, her quasi-fairytale compositions engage with vertiginous simultaneity, idiosyncratic figuration, and surreal narrativity. In her work, there is a porosity of being, children roam fields of flowers in which their own faces peer back at them, animals approach as friends and hover as protecting spirits over landscapes rife with foliage, lovers can be star-crossed and bridegrooms monstrous. However, any perception of faux-naif sensibility belies a complex reparative impulse for portraying worlds in whose making Chantladze recenters her vision and subject position within a culture that has traditionally allowed for this kind of creative labor and selftaught practice to remain invisible. ...
francesca kaufmann gallery opened in January 2000. Since then, the gallery has aimed to explore a diverse range of media, with a focus on video, site specific installation, and a special attention towards the works of female artists. After ten years in its historical location, the gallery opened in a new space in October 2010, under the name kaufmann repetto, to mark the partnership between Francesca Kaufmann and Chiara Repetto. In its new location, the gallery has been able to further develop its exhibition programming through a project space dedicated predominantly to younger artists, as well as a courtyard for large scale outdoor installations, which run parallel to the gallery’s main exhibition schedule. In 2013, the gallery inaugurated a new location in Chelsea, New York, with a parallel program to the gallery’s main space in Milan. In 2019 the New York location moved to Tribeca, expanding to a 3,000 sq ft exhibition space. The inaugural exhibition at the gallery’s new space in Tribeca was a solo show by Lily van der Stokker. ...
