Nina Akhobadze

added.appended.foreign

12.12.2025 -20.01.2026

E.Tatishvili st.9, Tbilisi, Georgia

Window Project is pleased to present added.appended.foreign., the first solo exhibition of Nina Akhobadze in Georgia. Bringing together large-scale oil paintings, miniature canvases, and graphic compositions, the exhibition traces Akhobadze’s evolving exploration of abstraction within contemporary painting.

Akhobadze’s works unfold through intuitive and tactile encounters with pigment, texture, and surface. Through accumulative layering and sustained attention to form, they cultivate rhythm, tension, and depth, producing surfaces that register the temporality of process and evoke perceptual resonance. Rejecting figuration, her practice probes the expressive and psychological capacities of abstraction, tracing the thresholds between the tangible and the felt, the seen and the remembered. Repeated gestures, stratified surfaces, and decisions embedded at every stage of the painting process collectively form a visual language that is at once intimate and deeply attuned to contemporary painterly discourse.

The exhibition title - added. appended. foreign. - drawn from one of the works on view, delineates the conceptual architecture of Akhobadze’s approach. “Added” invokes the cumulative layering of gestures and decisions; “Appended” names interventions that coexist without assimilation; and “Foreign” articulates the presence of difference within abstraction, the subtle tensions, displacements, and emergent possibilities that arise as the artist’s perspective and lived experience intersect with established visual traditions.

The large-scale canvases operate as spatial propositions, architectures of colour and mark that reorganise the gallery’s interior. Their oscillating chromatic fields, residual traces, and emergent spatial structures resist fixity: marks accumulate, mutate, and are periodically submerged. Each work discloses a record of close looking and intuitive recalibration, revealing a painterly intelligence predicated on responsiveness rather than predetermined form. In counterpoint, the intimate, almost miniature canvases not only modulate the exhibition’s internal tempo but also expose the elasticity of scale within Akhobadze’s visual language. The graphic compositions explore line, interval, and rupture, revealing the formal logic that underpins her visual vocabulary. Across these formats, Akhobadze foregrounds process and multiplicity, allowing each trace to embody both material decision-making and affective resonance.

Akhobadze’s ongoing movement across media and scale constitutes an expanded inquiry into the ontology of abstraction. Her practice aligns with Griselda Pollock’s feminist re-examination of abstract art in Abstraction and Difference (1988) and is further illuminated by Pollock’s later assertion that the artist’s bodily engagement in the work of painting marks “a site of psychosomatic subjectivity rather than anatomy” (Killing Men & Dying Women, 2022). In Akhobadze’s paintings, the surface becomes a repository of memory, intention, hesitation, and affective charge, an index of the temporal condition of making and of the reciprocal, almost corporeal, dialogue between artist and material.

Positioned within a field long canonised through masculinised frameworks, Akhobadze’s practice asserts an alternative genealogy of abstraction, one that foregrounds plurality and embodied difference. Her work demonstrates that abstraction remains a vital, generative space in which divergent subjectivities and material imaginaries may coexist, unsettle, and expand the discourse of contemporary painting.

Nina Akhobadze (b. 1997, Samtredia, Georgia) lives and works in Vienna, Austria. She studied Painting and Graphic Arts at the Tbilisi State Academy of Arts (2015-2019) under Oleg Timchenko, and she continues her practice at the University of Art and Design Linz with Anne Speier and Sergei Tcherepnin. Her first solo exhibition, It Takes Space, was presented at Galerie Roberta Keil, Vienna (2025). Her work has been exhibited at NADA Villa Warsaw (2025), Vienna Contemporary (2024), Schlossmuseum Linz (2024), Tbilisi Art Fair (2024), and in group exhibitions across Tbilisi and Vienna.

Lela Grigalashvili