George Kandelaki Studio

If you find yourself pondering your place “between two worlds” of economic and political changes, post-modern philosophy and engineered life not only in the virtual realities of cyberspace communities, open yourself to art. Art offers ways of understanding and responding to this progressive sense of disorientation through outliving the philosophical and existential questions posed by the artists in their creations.Open yourself to art of Georgi Kandelaki.

Georgi Kandelaki, 1972, is a global village artist who creates images that can resonate with the minds and emotions of people from different cultures, images that appeal to the rebellious and modern aesthetic strike of progressive spectators. Kandelaki can already be identified as a non-conformist artist by the right of birth in the artistic, rich with traditions, multicultural family of Georgian Artist Vladimir Kandelaki, 1943, a member of UNESCO International Federation of Artists and Honored Professor of Tbilisi Academy of Fine Arts. Following into educational steps of his father, Georgi attended Nicoladze Art School, Tbilisi State Academy of Fine Art specializing in painting, fresco painting and sculpture and earning a BFA. After the Kandelaki family immigrated to the USA, Georgi advanced his education at Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. Currently, he is a member of International Foundation of Art. Georgi’s latest art show in 2009 was at The Salamagundi Club, New York City.

Georgi’s expressive style is distinctively different from his famous father. His life in essence is a constant evolution and choice between two worlds of his Georgian and Russian ancestry and his emergence into innovative art current with a specifically American identity, between his father’s aesthetical principals of academic technique and his unique voice speaking up cathartic abilities of art: the pent-up anger, frustration, joy, desire all set free in the abstract expressionistic mode.

The copy-of-a-copy has become the only way to survive artistic reality. Georgi chose to find his own identity, to light his own fire as a modern observer of public life and an original artist. Kandelaki in Georgian means “candle”. Georgi’s “light” is not about cataloguing an epoch’s social types or producing chopped up political slogans in the aftermath of Georgia-Russia conflict. It does not lend itself to such meanings. A great proportion of his artistic output is concerned with self-referential visual and verbal emotional pulse of his past and present experiences between two worlds. It is an existentialist and individualist position that did not assume any explicit political form. Looking at Georgi Kandelaki’s art, one can find clear expressionist matrix with post Cubist values, mixture of abstraction and surrealism reflecting his Georgian ancestry and the whole rainbow of human emotions in the subject matter of modern life and love. His original, attuned to the changing moods personality emerges from his use of color – all shades of warm, bright palettes- a visual equivalent of himself. The fundamental theme of his paintings is centered on the female/male figures, the forms of which contorted and ravished, came to assume a dimension both tragic and grotesque.

Georgi Kandelaki is aware of the expressive power and visual impact of his works. He does not expect the vindication of his aesthetics, but he invites us to open the door into “between two worlds” existence of a contemporary artist and to find our own answers to the fundamental existential question of our complex modern word: what it means to be a human.