Enigmatic artist offers window into her soul

The meticulously crafted paintings of Georgian artist Sopho Chkhikvadze are easier to describe than to analyse and interpret. Often the artist presents solitary figures who inhabit defined and enclosed spaces, or who are seen against stark backgrounds. In one, a besuited middle-aged male figure, whose face is a mask of bland anonymity, holds a bunch of cellophane-wrapped carnations that droop towards the ground. It’s a sad and forlorn image, bereft of any kind of context or clue towards its deciphering. Who is the figure? Where is he? What do the flowers represent, if anything?

A conversation with the artist herself fails to illuminate such details. It’s not that she deliberately obfuscates; it is, rather, that she is unable to provide the key to her own sub-conscious, which may ultimately, in turn, unlock “meaning”. Ascribing intent to any artist’s work is a foolish tactic but there’s a strong temptation here to find equivalences and explanations the artist’s life, the sometimes traumatic and brutal history of her nation and the chaotic state of our contemporary world.

In another striking but equally poignant work, a dwarf woman in a lime green dress defiantly straddles a black pony, against a deep azure and cerulean ground. A historical or mythological figure from Georgian’s rich and complex cultural history, perhaps a princess?

It may be easier to deal with Chkhikvadze’s apparently more conventional portraits: a huge close-up of a pale-skinned girl with freckled cheeks; a round-faced, sallow-skinned woman with deep-set, dark eyes. But it’s not convincing to see these primarily as likenesses because they keep reflecting themselves back to the artist, and her deeply emotional and complex nature, so that they become not images of others, but self-portraiture.

David Hockney famously painted his subjects in and around swimming pools, but forget any hint here of the superficial sun and splash of Beverly Hills. Chkhikvadze converts these places of leisure into sites of stark self-reflection, where the subject is revealed as the object and the artist seems to scrutinise herself harshly and unflinchingly.

There’s no doubting this artist’s sincerity and integrity. These are works that needed to be made. I imagine many others were discarded and erased, in process, not allowed to to see the light of day — victims of Chkhikvadze’s severe self-criticality.

She has laid herself bare and that is an act of great bravery.

Until November 1