Nina Kintsurashvili: Creature, Creatures

15 January - 8 March, 2026

Bukia Vakhania is pleased to launch its Berlin exhibition space with a solo presentation, 'Creature, Creatures' by Georgian artist Nina Kintsurashvili. This inaugural exhibition marks both the opening of the gallery and Kintsurashvili’s first solo show in Berlin. Founded by Natia Bukia and Salome Vakhania, the gallery is dedicated to presenting contemporary Georgian art to international audiences.

The exhibition features a new body of work that continues Kintsurashvili’s research-based painterly practice, in which fragments of memory, misremembered shapes, and cultural residues are layered, erased, overwritten, and reimagined across the canvas. Her compositions unfold through an ongoing act of building and dismantling, treating painting not as a site of representation but as one of construction—an active space where images emerge through gesture, formal tension, repetition, and revision.

Although abstract in its visual language, her practice draws on a wide range of visual references that resurface from different cultural and historical contexts. Remote rural landscapes marked by prehistoric archaeological sites, visited while the artist worked as a long-distance trekking guide; Byzantine iconography; and remnants of Soviet visual culture encountered in Tbilisi’s second-hand book dealers (bukinists) form parts of her personal vocabulary that often appear across her canvases as monumentalized fragments, influencing individual formal decisions in each painting. Objects and artifacts often serve her process of image-making as a human model would serve a figurative painter, or a landscape to a plein-air artist. Through constant layering, erasing, and rebuilding—in a process of what Deleuze calls ‘a catastrophe in painting’—new images and environments emerge, uncontained by the canvas.

At the core of her work is an engagement with the visual potential of absence. Misremembered shapes, fractured vessels, vandalized frescoes, or poor images circulating online operate as generative elements in her image-making process. These fragments, suspended between erosion and memory, prompt a questioning of how we preserve, interpret, and imagine what has been lost. Through fragmentation and reconstruction, these images are recontextualized within painterly space, remaining simultaneously original and resonant with traces of their origins.

Nina Kintsurashvili (b. 1992) is a Tbilisi- and New York–based painter and multidisciplinary artist. After receiving a bachelor’s degree in painting from the Tbilisi State Academy of Arts, she was awarded a Fulbright Scholarship to continue her studies in the Intermedia and Sculpture Department at the University of Iowa.

Kintsurashvili’s work has been exhibited at Konsthall C (Stockholm, Sweden), Kunstraum Lakeside (Klagenfurt, Austria), the Svaneti Museum of History and Ethnography (Mestia, Georgia), Bukia Vakhania (Tbilisi, Georgia), LC Queisser (Tbilisi, Georgia), Commune Gallery (Vienna, Austria), E.A. Shared Space (Tbilisi, Georgia), and Polina Berlin Gallery (New York, USA).