Though an obscure name among international art circles, the late artist and poet Karlo Kacharava is something of a legend in his native Georgia. A rebellious cult figure, he exhibited regularly in Tbilisi during the glasnost period of the 1980s and early 1990s, when the Soviet Union began opening up the West. Whether his provocative approach and prodigious output would have gained him global stature in his lifetime is something we will never know: his budding career was cut short in 1994 when he died from a brain aneurysm, aged 30.That question of “what could have been?” compels the first-ever institutional solo show of Kacharava’s work outside of Georgia, which is currently taking place at the Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst (Smak) in Ghent, Belgium. Karlo Kacharava: Sentimental Traveller (until 15 April) stakes a claim for the long-overlooked artist and polymath to be included in the 20th-century avant-garde pantheon. Tasked with introducing European audiences to the artist, the show presents a broad sweep of Kacharava’s figurative paintings and drawings made over his decade-long career, supplementing them with his writings, personal effects and documentation of his exhibitions and performances. The largest work, an imposingly scaled but awkwardly proportioned portrait of a military general, who appears to be dripping in blood, greets visitors to the show. General, Für Helena (for Helena, 1988), which was inspired by Kacharava’s time spent in military service in Siberia, once hung in the US Embassy in Tbilisi and was unintentionally hidden for years by a wall erected during building renovations. Rediscovered around a decade ago, it is now held in a studio outside Tbilisi specifically designed for its display. Its uncovering is an apt metaphor for the renewed attention being paid to the artist some 30 years after his death.The prime works in the show are Kacharava’s paintings and drawings depicting psychologically charged yet ambiguous scenes of figures, crowded in desolate urban settings or floating in empty space. Their tapered, avian-like features and languid expressions evoke those in works by famed early 20th-century European painters such as George Grosz, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and Egon Schiele. Those artists are among the dozens of cultural figures who are openly referenced by Kacharava in his work. The writers Susan Sontag and Bob Dylan are name-checked alongside the Italian Futurist Mario Sironi, after whom a 1992 painting is titled. Their inclusions illuminate the sheer volume and variety of cultural content that was creeping into Georgia from under the Iron Curtain during the collapse of the Soviet Union. Not that Kacharava relied solely on the West coming to Georgia. He also travelled extensively across Europe. Accordingly, some of his contemporaries from the Neue Wilde and Transavanguardia artistic groups are referenced, including Jörg Immendorff and Enzo Cucchi. A prolific writer himself, Kacharava captioned many of these works in Georgian and German. Passages of poetry, or simply names, appear graffiti-like on walls, or simply emblazoned on the canvas.Karlo Kacharava’s Nick Cave (1992)Courtesy of the estate of Karlo Kacharava, Tbilisi, and Modern Art, LondonIn one room of the show, a selection of Kacharava’s eclectic vinyl record collection presents musical figures including Nick Cave, who is depicted in a 1992 painting of the same name. That Nick Cave work is one of around a dozen that visitors to the Smak exhibition might recognise from a 2021 show staged at the London-headquartered commercial gallery Modern Art, which signed the Kacharava estate that same year. That show was the first solo exhibition of the artist’s work outside of Georgia since a 2012 New York commercial exhibition of his works on paper; his last international solo show before that was in 1998, also in New York.The gallery took an interest in Kacharava after another of its represented artists, the Russian-born Sanya Kantarovsky, recommended him upon seeing his work in a 2018 group show at the recently closed New York gallery Metro Pictures. So impressed was Modern Art’s founder, Stuart Shave, by Kacharava’s oeuvre that he signed the estate without having seen any of the works in person (the Covid-19 pandemic having complicated his travel plans). “It was an immediate reaction,” Shave says of discovering the works. “I was taken by how far he was looking beyond his own environment. He was an insatiable sponge.” Within a few months, his gallery consigned “most of the best paintings that can be sold”. Modern Art has loaned around 60% of the 70-odd works in the Smak show— a figure that rises to around 90% when accounting for just paintings. Modern Art’s 2021 show was the first real test for Kacharava’s market this century, and a number of works were held back from sale, “only being available for major institutional purchases”. No museum has yet bought a work by the artist from Modern Art. Last June at Art Basel the gallery brought Nick Cave to it stand; it is now “no longer for museum [purchase] only”, according to the gallery’s website. Kacharava’s drawings begin at around $6,000 and his paintings go “up to $150,000”, Shave says. “We don’t treat Kacharava as an emerging artist,” he adds. “This is someone with a vast body of work behind him and a clear, unique style.” Shave’s ambitions are met with a healthy amount of stock—Kacharava is described as having left behind “an oceanic body of work”. The gallery are now in the process of sorting through the artist’s cluttered apartment in Tbilisi, where works have been stored in files and not seen for decades. Modern Art is in talks with the estate to consign a number of Kacharava’s works on paper; it plans to hold a show of some of these works later this year in London, Shave says. The posthumous commercial signing of an artist’s estate, especially one whose market is underdeveloped, can ring alarm bells. Often these artists were sceptical of commodifying their practices. This appears not to be the case for Kacharava, according to a key art world figure who was close to him in his lifetime. Irena Popiashvili, a curator from Tbilisi, first met Kacharava was she was at art school in Tbilisi. “I got a call one day that Karlo wanted to meet me. He wouldn’t take no for answer. Karlo made things happen. That was his magic.” Kacharava was “immensely ambitious”, Popiashvili says, and an avid self promoter of his work. “He wanted to be famous, to have his work seen.” She works closely with Kacharava’s sister, Lena, who runs the estate. Since Kacharava’s death, she has staged a number of shows of his work, including a major retrospective in 2017 at the Georgian National Museum in Tbilisi. It was at that show that Smak’s curators were first introduced to Kacharava’s work.As Kacharava becomes better known to international audiences, Popiashvili is adamant that he continues to be understood as a “rebel artist” with “radical, often dissident politics”. The turbulent political backdrop of Georgia is certainly present across his work (the country gained independence from the USSR in 1991; that same year it entered a civil war which lasted until 1994.) One series of works on paper shows, on its reverse, portraits of Russian and Georgian politicians with their faces scribbled out in black marker.Moreover, Popiashvili wants to foreground how immensely influential Kacharava has been to a generation of Georgian artists practising today. “He is more alive today than he was 30 years ago,” she says. “He absorbed all these ideas and then transmitted them to us. He was our radio. It is time that was properly acknowledged.”
