Tamo Jugeli

Tanya Leighton, Berlin is pleased to present A Clear Horizon, an exhibition by Georgian painter Tamo Jugeli.

On view in the gallery is a series of new paintings that exemplify the artist’s instinctual, abstract style for which she has quickly gained recognition – an unpolished yet mature voice that she honed by shirking traditional art school, opting instead for a mentorship under acclaimed Georgian artist Gia Edzgveradze. Indeed, Jugeli, who began her career as a journalist, came to painting through an unorthodox and self-taught path. It was not until fate had dealt the artist a severe emotional “low point” in early adulthood that she turned to painting, first therapeutically and then as a calling.

Today, now based in Brooklyn, Jugeli’s work recalls the emotional immediacy and physical action of post-war expressive and lyrical abstraction, artistic currents that are typified by an investment in antirealism, intuition, visually engrossing energy and a general hostility toward academicism. The rich and dirty ochres, yellows, teals and vivid greens of her palette are dotted with blacks so solid that they suggest the mouth of a cave. Like her post-war antecedents, the canvas for Jugeli is less a luminous window and more a dark passage to another kind of representational realm (a space whose meditative atmosphere inexorably leads to an existential mood).

Tamo Jugeli (b. 1994, Tbilisi, Georgia) lives and works in New York. Her solo exhibitions include Polina Berlin Gallery, New York; Artbeat, Tbilisi and Street Gallery, Batumi, Georgia. Other recent exhibitions include ‘Soft Focus’ at superzoom, Paris and ‘Beautiful, Vivid, Self-contained’ at Hill Art Foundation, New York, both in 2023; ‘Digital Natives’ at TBC Concept, Tbilisi and ‘Limen’ at Svaneti Museum of History and Ethnography, Mestia, Georgia, both in 2021, among others.