The visible and the invisible

Giorgi Kobiashvili

Winner — BUAT Curatorial Award 2026 · First Prize

Solo Exhibition
28 January – 6 February 2027
BUAT Fine Art Gallery, Barcelona

There are images that belong to history, and there are images that refuse to remain there.

In the work of Giorgi Kobiashvili, religious narratives, archetypal figures and inherited symbols are removed from the distance of the past and returned to the unstable territory of contemporary human experience. Christ, Adam and Eve, Judas, angels, sacrifice, apocalypse and transfiguration appear not as illustrations of doctrine, but as structures through which the artist examines the enduring conditions of being human: faith and doubt, innocence and guilt, violence and compassion, suffering and hope, destruction and the possibility of renewal.

Kobiashvili’s practice occupies the space between the sacred and the psychological, the historical and the contemporary, the visible and the invisible.

His imagery is immediately recognisable, yet never entirely familiar. References to Christian iconography coexist with anatomical forms, political emblems, animals, industrial materials and fragments of the contemporary world. The symbolic vocabulary of the past is disrupted and reconstructed, allowing ancient narratives to become vehicles for present-day questions.

This tension is fundamental to the artist’s work.

The cross may simultaneously evoke sacrifice, power, violence and redemption. The biblical body becomes a contemporary body. Apocalypse ceases to belong exclusively to prophecy and becomes a condition that can be political, ecological, psychological or personal. Adam and Eve no longer represent only the beginning of humanity, but the recurring confrontation with consciousness, vulnerability, responsibility and shame.

Kobiashvili does not attempt to resolve these contradictions. Instead, he constructs spaces in which opposing states are allowed to coexist.

His use of material reinforces this instability. Painting is frequently expanded through metal, wood, earth, gold leaf, found elements and light, transforming the surface into a physical object. Materials are not merely decorative additions; they enter the conceptual structure of the work. Metal can become wound, relic, machinery or armour. Gold retains the historical memory of sacred painting while acquiring a new and sometimes unsettling role. Earth introduces the elemental and mortal. Light moves between revelation and artificiality.

The result is a practice in which traditional painting continually pushes beyond its own boundaries.

Scale is equally important. Many of Kobiashvili’s works confront the viewer at near-architectural dimensions. Human figures, crosses, bodies and symbolic structures cease to function as distant images and begin to occupy the viewer’s physical space. The encounter becomes bodily as well as intellectual.

Yet despite the monumentality of the works, their central territory remains intensely human.

The Visible and the Invisible is therefore not an exhibition about religion in a conventional sense. It is an exhibition about the persistence of questions for which humanity has repeatedly created religious, philosophical and artistic images.

What do we believe when established systems collapse?
What remains after betrayal?
What is sacrifice, and who determines its value?
Where does guilt begin?
Can suffering produce transformation?
And what does redemption mean in a world that repeatedly recreates the conditions of its own destruction?

Kobiashvili approaches these questions without offering a fixed interpretation. His symbols remain open, sometimes contradictory, requiring the viewer to negotiate their own position before them.

This openness is crucial. The work does not ask for agreement; it asks for recognition, interpretation and reflection.

Across the exhibition, recurring images form an interconnected visual system. The human body appears vulnerable and monumental, sacred and corporeal. Animals shift between innocence, sacrifice and collective behaviour. Historical symbols encounter contemporary forms of authority. Creation and destruction repeatedly follow one another. The spiritual is never separated from the physical world but embedded within it.

In this sense, Kobiashvili’s work can be understood as a contemporary form of existential iconography.

He takes images that have accumulated centuries of cultural memory and subjects them to the pressures of the present. Rather than rejecting tradition, he activates it — testing whether its symbols can still speak to contemporary experience and what meanings emerge when they are placed within new political, material and psychological realities.

The Visible and the Invisible presents this practice as an evolving body of thought rather than a sequence of isolated works.

The exhibition invites the viewer into a world in which the ancient and the contemporary continually overlap; where familiar symbols become uncertain again; and where the act of looking becomes inseparable from the act of questioning.

The answers, if they exist, are not supplied by the artist.

They remain somewhere between the image and the person standing before it.

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About the Artist

Giorgi Kobiashvili is a contemporary artist based in Tbilisi, Georgia. His multidisciplinary practice encompasses painting, mixed media and object-based work, combining traditional pictorial language with unconventional materials and contemporary symbolism.

Kobiashvili studied Fine Arts and Easel Painting before completing a Master of Arts in Fine Graphics at the Apolon Kutateladze Tbilisi State Academy of Arts. His work has been presented internationally, including exhibitions and projects in Tbilisi, Warsaw, Venice, Berlin and New York.

In 2026, Giorgi Kobiashvili was selected as the First Prize Winner of the BUAT Curatorial Award 2026.

The Visible and the Invisible, presented at BUAT Fine Art Gallery in Barcelona from 28 January to 6 February 2027, forms part of the award and marks his solo presentation with the gallery.

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