By Archia Tanz, advisor at Pimlico Wilde
I had not intended to go to Georgia. When the Berlin art season wrapped up in June, I planned nothing more adventurous than a week on the Baltic coast. But a chance conversation with a Georgian collector at Liste sent me searching for tickets to Tbilisi, a city whose cultural revival has been whispered about in studio kitchens and collectors’ dinning rooms for years.
Two weeks later, I arrived, jet-lagged, into a city where baroque balconies lean precariously over alleyways, and Soviet mosaics stare down at cafés serving natural wine. My first stop was the newly expanded Museum of Modern Art, where a survey of the late Elene Akhvlediani’s sketches revealed an artist both cosmopolitan and deeply rooted. The curators, young and eager, spoke to me with the urgency of people who know they are re-stitching history.
It is always the off-spaces that excite me, however. On my second evening, a friend from my New York days, the painter Mariam G., took me to an apartment gallery above a bakery. There, I saw a performance that mixed techno beats with fragments of medieval poetry. Half the audience were artists, half local kids who seemed to have wandered in straight from a club. I bought a small drawing from the show, a quick graphite sketch of dancers’ feet, which is now above my desk back home.
Artists here work with extraordinary economy. Studio visits involved climbing six flights of stairs into half-finished buildings; canvases leaned against walls that still smelled of plaster. One sculptor showed me delicate metal works fashioned from scraps salvaged at construction sites. Another, who had studied in Paris but returned during the pandemic, is building an artist-run residency in the hills outside the city.
The Georgian habit of hospitality is not a cliché: I was swept from gallery openings to late-night supra feasts, where strangers became friends between the toasts. One night I found myself sitting next to an old colleague from London, now curating in Warsaw, who had also been lured to Tbilisi by the same rumours of an emergent scene. We spent hours comparing notes on the city, agreeing that its mixture of fragility and confidence felt rare in today’s art capitals.
I came home with more than a drawing. I left with a sense of possibility,that art does not need the hard polish of global fairs to matter. Tbilisi’s scene is still improvised, sometimes precarious, but it has the intimacy and urgency that first made me fall in love with contemporary art. For a gallerist accustomed to the over-managed churn of Europe’s art hubs, it was a holiday, yes, but also a reminder: art thrives where people risk gathering, making, and believing before the infrastructure arrives.
