Alexander Bandzeladze

The recent years of democracy have broken the dike and poured forth in a cloudy stream -- still reminiscent of anarchy. For the time being, the avantgarde is whirling around its talents in the direction of fame.... And again there is the question for me -- where am I ...?

Alexander Bandzeladze is considered the founder and spiritual leader of the Georgian abstract painters. Many artists of the younger generation, including Gia Edzgveradze took his "secret course in abstract creativity" (Hubertus Gassner). Bandzeladze taught how to separate beautifully curving contour lines and an open painterly gesture in pictures, and how to include the ground both as material support and spiritual space.

According to Leonid Bazhanov, the Moscow art historian who discovered contemporary Georgian art for Muscovites, Bandzeladze is unique in that he represented the avant-garde in Georgia in the 1970s virtually single-handedly. "Since then, three, and perhaps even four generation of Georgian painters [have been] practically born at the same time - an explosion". This "explosion" became evident in the 1980s, the most important years for Georgian art. During that decade, a variety of eye-opening Georgian art exibitions rocked not only Georgia, but art centers throughout the USSR and in Europe as well.