Kornfeld Gallery
Berlin, Germany
16th March 2014
With these words, Steve Jobs, the man who whispered to the future, the Mac Guru, the multi-layered inventor has terminated his speech to the University graduate students. And with his brain has started a new era!
With the same energy and talent, in West Kensington London branch of the Berlin based gallery: Kornfeld, I have discovered through Mr M. Bliadze’s private studio view, the amazing art of Natela Iankoshvili. The Kornfeld, an extremely interesting gallery, owns in fact 25 paintings of a Georgian artist who did the same revolution Jobs did, one century before, but in the field of arts. And Being a Woman!
When she declared: “Material problems gave me more strength and energy”, she exactly grasped or better anticipated Steve Jobs’ suggestion, cause she was not rich, never wanted to sell her paintings and had a bizarre, unique temper. In sort a great soul!
Born in 1918 in Gurjaani Georgia, she came from a very intellectual family and then married a famous novelist: Lado Avaliani. She was a global artist; not only a genial painter, but she even created dresses, bags, shoes, accessories of her own design to avoid dull colors and uniform of Soviet Union’s imposition. A living legend, she always swam against the flow, both psychologically and technically. That’s when a Genius appears!
That’s maybe why in 1995 in independent Georgia she was given the Shota Rustaveli prize, a national award. Then in 2002 she was made honorary citizen of Tbilisi; in 2003 she was conferred the rank of the “best woman of the year” by American Institute. She did solo and group exhibition in Russia, Belgium, Italy, France, Greece, Sweden and has been collected by Fidel Castro, Nicolas Gilien, Raj Kapoor, Gorbaciov and Shevarnadze.
Despite all, both political and social blocks, Natela Iankoshvili remained a non-conformist. She was the only woman who was allowed, in communist period, to go to Paris in 1977. Moreover she never intended to paint the realism required by socialism and Soviet Union: labourers or workman in the fields. She only portrayed clever, elegant, sensitive, aristocratic natures, succeeding in this to grasp the inner soul of every human being she painted.
She was in fact able to portrait the invisible, the essential, what Paul Virilio defined as The Aesthetics of Disappearance. He introduced his understanding of "picnolepsy—the epileptic state, the consciousness invented by the subject through its very absence: the gaps, glitches, and speed bumps lacing through and defining it”.
Deep paintings. Blu and dark as the night. Sudden colours, as strong as scars, appear immediately; like the rainbow after the storm. With this dichotomic contrast and its revelation of nature, the work of Georgian artist Natela Iankoshvili forever[GS1] strikes everybody’s eyes and DNA.
As primitive and naif as the Fauves’ movement, as powerful as Cezanne, as misterious as Paul Klee in the Der Blaue Reiter, either spiritual or iconoclast as August Macke, Alexej von Jawlensky, remindful of Nolde but with a joy that only a woman really knows, Natela filters in her work all the European painting history but she is able to reinvent it. Thanks to her powerful interpretation of reality, an intense use of colours full of paradoxes, poetic tension and deeply fused with a nomadic Nature.
Instead of normal addition of colours she works on paint removal. She takes away instead of adding. This technique is really unique. And if in one sense she has a powerful, free and bold brushwork on the other she offers a meticulous and precise quality of drawing, creating thus masterpieces, complete works, made with passions, emotions and a skilled hand.
Normally dark and black painting convey a general sense of loss and sadness. She is capable instead of provoking joy out if this darkness bringing out a deeper sense of hopefulness. Even and mainly in a spiritual and philosophical way. Being a sort of Dracula, she takes out all the emotions one hide inside and with her paintings she is capable of letting the viewer into a new space and time gap, a new horizon. Exactly the same revolution Mark Rothko (1903) did with abstract painting, one can say she did with figurative one.
Her selling prices range from 50.000 to 130.000 euros and when Europe and the market will see again these works the price will definitely grow more.
