Miart 2026

Presented artists: Nika Kutateladze and Zauri Matikashvili

Bukia Vakhania presents a duo presentation of Georgian artists Nika Kutateladze and Zauri Matikashvili at Miart 2026. The presentation brings together two practices that focus on transformation and the shifting nature of identity.

Both artists engage with metamorphosis, yet their work grows out of distinct cultural and spatial conditions, which shape the logic of their visual languages. Matikashvili draws from the public urban sphere, where identity is tied to monuments, symbols, and the physical weight of power. He pulls these elements into a process of transformation that echoes the traits of monumental form: scale, permanence, heavy materials, and symbolic charge. By reshaping these features, he questions how visibility and spatial dominance operate as tools of control in shared space. In contrast, Kutateladze’s work takes root in a rural landscape marked by depopulation, fragmentation, and loss. In this context, identity is not built through public markers; it forms through interior life shaped by emotion, shifting psychology, and the pressure of absence.

Alongside these sculptures, Kutateladze presents a painting series built around hybrid beings that blur the line between human and non-human. Instead of referencing existing myths, he invents personal, emotionally charged figures shaped by the present moment. Working with a cold, atmospheric palette of blues and greys, he paints scenes that feel like dream-spaces or inner terrains. The human figure never appears fixed. It shifts, fractures, and reforms, suggesting identity in motion. These figures stay suspended in states of becoming. They never lock into a single form or presence. They drift between human and creature, solid and fading, always halfway between what they were and what they might be.

Zauri Matikashvili’s sculptural practice reinterprets classical monumentality through a lens of fragility and transformation. Monuments have long served political agendas, shaping collective memory and reinforcing systems of power. Matikashvili responds to this legacy by reshaping familiar figures—kings, warriors, guardians, and mythical beings—into forms that appear softened, collapsing, or mid-transformation. Matikashvili’s sculptures become ‘post-monuments’, miniaturizing symbols of power into delicate, toy-like relics that question the very notion of heroism and authority.

Nika Kutateladze was born in 1989 in Tbilisi, Georgia, where he lives and works. He completed his education at Masters level at the Centre of Contemporary Art, Tbilisi (CCA-T) in 2013. Prior to that he studied on the faculty of Architecture at the Tbilisi State Academy of Arts between 2007 and 2011.

The majority of the artworks comprise installations and sculptures, reflecting day-to-day consumerism and different environmental issues. His later artistic utterances challenge the transformative process of architectural spaces and urban environment, in general.

Over the past few years, Kutateladze has expanded his artistic practice to include painting. Working in oil on grounded wood drawing on the tradition of Orthodox iconography and, more recently, in oil on canvas, his paintings reflect on the everyday relationships of people living side by side in rural communities.

Kutateladze has had solo exhibitions at Mendes Wood DM, New York; Modern Art, London; Vitrine, London and Gallery Artbeat, Tbilisi. His works have been included in exhibitions at Chateau La Coste, Le Puy-Sainte-Réparade, France (2025); MAISON DES ARTS GEORGES & CLAUDE POMPIDOU, Cajarc, France (2024); CCA, Berlin, Germany (2024); Oxygen Biennial, Tbilisi, Georgia (2021); Foundation Cartier, Paris (2019); Tbilisi Architectural Biennial, Tbilisi, Georgia (2018); Kunsthalle Tbilisi, Georgia (2018); Centre of Contemporary Art Tbilisi, Georgia (2013) among others.

Zauri Matikashvili was born in the Georgian town of Qvareli. After studying fine arts in Münster and Düsseldorf, he now lives and works in Münster and Amsterdam. In his films, performances, installations, and sculptures, he questions the socio-cultural and political contexts of different societies and nations that shape the construction of identity in individual realities and families.

He is particularly interested in how narratives and images create community. He often focuses on people who otherwise receive little attention. His work fluctuates between observation, testimony, (media) creation and deliberate provocation. In many cases he combines video installations with objects made of ceramics, porcelain, wax, and metal, as well as found objects from nature. Besides, he experimentally coats ceramics with earth, metals, or dust.

Zauri Matikashvili's works have been shown in numerous exhibitions, for example at Off space BSMNT in Leipzig (2026), at the Julia Stoschek Foundation in Düsseldorf (2025), at Kunst in Tunnel (KIT) in Düsseldorf (2025), at the LWL Museum of Art and Culture in Münster (2025), at Het Documentaire Paviljoen in Amsterdam (2024), at Antimatter Media Art in Victoria (Canada, 2023), at Art Matters in Hangzhou (2023), at the Eye Filmmuseum in Amsterdam (2023), in the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris (2022), at International Short Film Festival in Oberhausen (2022), at Kunstverein Harburger Bahnhof (2021) in Hamburg, at Münster Film Festival (2021), at HMKV in Dortmund (2021), at Atelier No. 63 PACT Zollverein in Essen (2020) and at Philara Collection in cooperation with Filmwerkstatt in Düsseldorf (2020).

Zauri Matikashvili was artist in residence at the Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten Amsterdam (2022–2024), at the Cité Internationale des Arts Paris (2022) and at PACT Zollverein in Essen (2021). He recently received fellowships from the Stiftung Kunstfonds (2025) and from the Kunststiftung NRW (2026). His works are part of the Collection of Contemporary Art of the Federal Republic of Germany, the collection of LWL Museum of Art and Culture, and private collections.