Levan Chogoshvili: Fragments of a Silenced History
In a world marked by war, displacement, and cultural erasure, the art of Levan Chogoshvili (b. 1953) resonates with quiet urgency. His paintings are acts of remembrance and resistance, weaving together personal memory and collective trauma. Working with layered compositions—archival photographs, Soviet-era imagery, traditional media—Chogoshvili confronts the silencing of Georgian identity. What emerges is a form of painting that doubles as testimony: alive and deliberately unresolved.
Born in Tbilisi under Soviet rule, Chogoshvili developed his practice within a cultural system that rewarded Socialist Realism and punished deviation. In his time, art academies taught students how to depict soldiers, cows, and factory workers. Anything else—especially if it evoked Georgia’s aristocratic, religious, or avant-garde past—risked censorship or worse. But Chogoshvili persistently refused.
That refusal marked the beginning of a five-decade career shaped by opposition. His most iconic body of work, the Destroyed Aristocracy series, draws on Georgian family photographs, which were illegal to possess at the time. These images were visual counter-histories: intellectuals, clerics, artists, mountain villagers, and strangers whose existence defied the flattening logic of the Soviet state. Chogoshvili turned them into icons of a spiritual aristocracy—his form of resistance. Today, Chogoshvili is widely regarded as one of Georgia’s most important living artists. His work is currently on view in a comprehensive exhibition at Kunsthalle Zürich, his largest show to date.
Across his work, there is a recurring gesture: the depiction of family. Family that is not only biological, but cultural, and bound together in disappearance. In Untitled (1985), from the Destroyed Aristocracy series, he reimagines a forbidden family portrait as a formal group scene. The aged, frayed paper surface feels like a fragile memory. Each figure signals a different social stratum—military, intellectual, cultural, rural—yet the composition holds them together in mutual silence. A child leans into a cushion, while an older woman sits grounded at the edge of the frame. Two central figures look directly at the viewer: a woman with a bleached, ghostlike face and striking brow, and a man with a scar-like shadow on his cheek. A man in the foreground turns away, caught mid-exit, as if walking out of history itself. Georgian script drifts through the background like an interrupted thought, while highly ornate rugs and cushions hint at a traditional Georgian interior, a lost domestic world.
The delicate balance between presence and disconnection defines Portrait of (the Artist’s) Parents (1977). The figures occupy the same canvas but not the same space. Blocks of brown, burgundy, off-white, and grey divide the composition into painterly zones that suggest emotional distance. The mother, looking away, supports her head with one hand, the other resting on her hip—a stance that reads as both tired and withholding. The father, dressed in the manner of a middle-class intellectual, carries an obvious strain: downturned mouth, tired eyes, face streaked with unsettling red tones. Below them, the children are grey, ghostlike—small in scale and dim in effect. This is not a painting about family, it’s a study in erasure, about familial collapse under ideological pressure.
Sometimes that erasure is literal. In Sisters Kutateladze (1979), two elegantly dressed women face forward—stylish, composed, slightly distant. But then unease sets in, as the eye notices their missing mouths, and unfinished bodies dissolving into raw canvas. A third woman emerges from darkness on the right side of the painting, her head bowed, paint running down the canvas from her eyes. It’s a scene less composed than haunted, where absence becomes a kind of speech.
Chogoshvili’s knack for conveying unspeakable violence through restraint is striking. Nowhere is that more evident than in the 1924 series, where a single, brutal motif—a dog carrying a severed human hand—recurs across three works spanning four decades. The image, drawn from a story told by the artist’s grandmother about the Bolshevik executions of Georgian dissidents, is rendered in scarlet silkscreen and pale pencil, collage and childhood drawing. In the 2024 versions, the motif is bold and declarative, printed in unmodulated red that reads as warning. The 1984 version, smaller and more intimate, layers trauma with a child’s hand, suggesting an early negotiation with violence.
A similar collapse of historical and personal time plays out in The Murder of Zurab Eristavi (1973–2003), a mixed-media painting that revisits the betrayal of a 17th-century Georgian nobleman. Chogoshvili doesn’t stage the event directly. Instead, he disperses it across a fractured surface built from marble powder, collage, and photocopy. The composition teems with visual noise—text, ornaments, architectural fragments—but at its centre lies a void. A sharp expanse of black in the shape of a man cuts through the scene like a wound, breaking continuity. It suggests a rupture in narrative, and in history itself—something lost, or violently removed.
Armenian Annunciation (1986) brings together much of Chogoshvili’s visual language—early Christian iconography, especially from Armenian and Georgian frescoes, and the planar abstraction of modernist painting. Forms are stripped to their essence: limbs flow like ribbons, a cascade of colour arcs across the left like a liturgical banner. Dense black space anchors the composition but does not define it. The figures, frozen mid-gesture, don’t enact a narrative so much as embody presence. Between them, fragmented patterns and ghostly vessels drift, suspending time. In the Soviet context, where both religious art and modernist experimentation were suppressed, the work lets them coexist, refusing the binary of past or present, sacred or formal.
Chogoshvili’s work evokes a quiet, aching kind of nostalgia, rooted in the weight of what’s been lost. His portraits don’t treat history as an idea, but render it tactile and lived: the curve of a shoulder, the fold of a sleeve, the space between two clasped hands. These are not just paintings—they’re acts of preservation. This existed. This mattered. Look again. And look closely—because the histories his work exhumes are not safely behind us. They threaten to repeat.
All images courtesy of Kunsthalle Zurich and Gabija Noller
