Catalogue from exhibition of Irma Sharikadze

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Irma Sharikadze and her "Letters" project.

 

Distinctive project "Letters" is perceiving in Moscow as a national and feminine. Georgian artist Irma Sharikadze explores the image of Mexican artist Frida Kahlo as a metaphor for identity - artistic, feminine and national. The first painting was a self-portrait of Frida. She paint herself as "she was the theme she knew better" as she was saying. The most important for us is her self-portrait with a twin sister. We can see two beautiful young women dressed more festively than ordinary, shown with naked hearts. Their hearts connected with the mutual bloodstream.

 

The "Letters" of Georgian artist reminds us of the common cultural blood circulation, about the ability of the art to overcome the geographic boundaries and to capture not only the people but the time itself.  The twin sister created by Frida - now as Irma’s Sharikadze character – creates Frida. In "Letters" both of them Frida and Maritza - alter ego of Georgian artist, her own game with the image of artist, with personage strategies, with history and languages of art.

 

Character tempts the artist with the opportunity to live one more life, the twin incarnates this possibility. Frida gave birth to Maritza, Frida appears in letters to Maritsa – sisters became the symbolic mothers to each other. ("We better make it this way: if you were my mother, and I'll be your mother, certainly, if you do not mind... ") In tender metaphor shimmering the intricate dialectic of image and referent, artist and character. This dialectic of formation is close to Frida Kahlo and composing perhaps the very essence of her painting. Irma Sharikadze embeds her own artistic formation in the story of imaginary sister’s biographies.

 

Moreover, the twin sisters are the beauty doubling. In vitality and concentrated beauty of the images of Georgian artist we can divine the line of Sergei’s Parajanov forcefield. Attention of the spectator, gliding along the perfect image, stops on the handwritten text below the picture. The stopped attention reads the project not through the pattern of the glossy magazines, to which refers every glamor picture, but trough the conceptual codes, with which, however, Irma about the same ratio as Frida with Surrealist painting. ("I was considered a surrealist. That is wrong. I have never painted my dreams. I reflected only my reality".)

 

Simultaneously be both sister and mother means a common father, becoming a husband. In my dream Frida sees her mother in batiste dress, under the light fabric detected the hairy men chest. Through this pretty horrible dream the creative effort is speaking in which individuality exempt from tribal taboos. Emansipatory effort of Irma Sharikadze herself appears in resistance of character to life circumstances, seeks the masculinity. The project electrified by the reflections - not even starting from the mirrors buy with phonetics: Frida, Irma, Georgia, Revolution, Maritza. Postcolonial rhymes - Georgian artist on Moscow art scene, as Mexican - on New York art scene. Frida was 23 years old when she was in New York. Here is another fact: Frida was wearing the pre-Columbian ancient Mesoamerican jewelry. In project we can see incredible jewelry recalling the archaic art. Peering into the mirror in installation we remember Frida chained to the hospital bed and for the first time holding up a brush to paint the first picture - herself.

 

Alexander Evangely