Frieze London 2026

Presented Artist Tamo Jugeli

Bukia Vakhania (Formerly Gallery Artbeat) presents a solo presentation by Georgian artist Tamo Jugeli, currently based in New York for Frieze London 2026. Conceived specifically for the art fair, the booth takes the form of a small, intimate interior closer to a room than a conventional stand where painting, wallpaper, and sculptural lighting come together to create a calm, domestic atmosphere.

Jugeli's paintings move fluidly between abstraction and figuration. Built through layered paint, strong contour lines, and continuous, sweeping gestures, the compositions suggest bodies and organic forms without settling into fixed images. Broad arcs of red, dense passages of ochre, deep blues, greens, and moments of exposed ground interact across the surfaces, creating a sense of movement and tension. Recurring curved shapes appear from one canvas to the next, allowing forms to migrate and transform, as if the paintings are in conversation with one another.

A key element of Jugeli’s practice is her sensitivity to place. Whenever she works in a new city or environment, she looks for ways to connect her work to the history and character of that location. For London, this takes the form of Pure Poppy, a wallpaper designed by William Morris, a 19th-century British artist, designer, and writer associated with the Arts and Crafts movement. Morris believed that art should be part of everyday life, and that beauty, craftsmanship, and function should exist together within the home. His approach to ornament was not decorative excess, but a way of shaping how people live with objects and spaces.

The wallpaper allows the booth to feel grounded in London's cultural and historical context, transforming it from a neutral display into a space shaped by memory, intimacy, and lived experience. Within this setting, four paintings are presented as the central focus of the booth. Installed in a measured rhythm across the two walls, the works are conceived as a connected group rather than isolated pieces. Each painting carries its own internal logic, yet together they form a continuous visual and emotional landscape that unfolds as the viewer moves through the space.

Sculptural lighting by Georgian designer Lado Lomitashvili punctuates the space, casting a warm, ambient glow that softens the patterned walls and subtly animates the surfaces of the paintings. The lighting contributes to the feeling of a lived-in interior, reinforcing the sense that the works belong to the space rather than merely occupying it.

For Jugeli, the decision to create a domestic setting is intentional and conceptual. She understands the home as the final destination of artworks—the place where paintings are lived with, revisited, and absorbed into everyday life. The booth therefore functions as a pre-figuration of this future context, collapsing the distance between public exhibition and private interior.

Within the fast-paced and commercial environment of fair this presentation offers a moment of pause. Drawing on Morris’ belief in the close relationship between art and everyday life, Jugeli's booth resists the neutrality of the white cube and instead proposes a space defined by intimacy, slowness, and attention.

The result is an environment in which painting is experienced not only as something to look at, but as something to live with—spatial, temporal, and deeply connected to how we inhabit space.