Gela MIKAVA

Joined Artfinder: May 2024

Artworks for sale: 147

(1)

Georgia

Updates from Gela MIKAVA's studio

  • ARTIST MANIFESTO by GELA MIKAVA

    ARTIST MANIFESTO by GELA MIKAVA

    ARTIST MANIFESTO by GELA MIKAVA I do not make art to soothe.  I do not paint to be understood.  I work so that what has no voice might leave a mark.  A trace. A wound. A refusal to disappear quietly. My paintings are not answers - they are remains.  They are what's left when empathy is not enough.  They are the body after the narrative has collapsed.  The scream behind the soft word.  The silence that still resists. This is not healing in the romantic sense.  It is not "care" as comfort, but as confrontation.  I create spaces where memory scratches at the surface,  where hands appear and disappear,  where language leaks and breaks down. I believe in tenderness, but not without violence.  I believe in beauty, but not without fracture.  And I believe that art must do more than decorate grief -   it must carry it, drag it, unfold it,  even when no one asks it to. I am not here to illustrate pain.  I am here to speak it in a language  that does not exist yet.

    25 July 2025

    Silent Softness: Gela Mikava and the Emergence of a New Visual Language By Annie, Art Critic and Curator

    Silent Softness: Gela Mikava and the Emergence of a New Visual Language By Annie, Art Critic and Curator

    --- Silent Softness: Gela Mikava and the Emergence of a New Visual Language By Annie, Art Critic and Curator Soft/flowers by GELA MIKAVAIn a time when contemporary painting often competes for attention through visual noise, Gela Mikava's work does the opposite: it leans into silence, into stillness, into the subtle intensity of things unsaid. His recent mixed-media piece is a powerful articulation of absence - not as void, but as presence deferred. A white shirt hangs from the upper edge of the canvas - not painted, but physically suspended - evoking the intimate scale of the human body without ever showing it. The garment is not decorative. It functions as a relic, a trace, perhaps a witness. This simple gesture destabilizes conventional categories: is it painting, installation, or performance residue? Mikava allows these forms to bleed into each other without resolution. And this, precisely, is where a new visual language begins to form. --- The Birth of a New Language Where others speak loudly, Mikava erases, softens, hesitates. He does not offer a message - he constructs the conditions for a psychological presence to emerge. The shirt becomes the proxy for an absent body; the erased or fragmented texts ("stay soft," "no room," "thought") operate as the remains of unspoken monologues. The viewer is not given a narrative - they are given a space to feel. This is not simply a re-use of ready-made or poetic gesture. Mikava's innovation lies in his ability to fuse object, memory, text, and silence into a single breathing surface. He does not merely blur disciplines; he collapses them. His canvas becomes a liminal zone - between material and immaterial, between personal and universal, between language and its failure. The traditional boundaries between painting, writing, and objecthood dissolve. That is the root of Mikava's new language: it is not built from what things mean, but from how they remain. --- A Choreographer of Withdrawal What sets Mikava apart is his refusal to explain. There is no demand for comprehension, no narrative closure. The work unfolds as a psychological architecture - an interior where the viewer is left to inhabit uncertainty. The use of negative space is not decorative but structural: silence here is not absence, but strategy. This is not the silence of emptiness, but of emotional complexity - of refined withdrawal. In this, Mikava joins a small but growing group of artists challenging the dominance of spectacle in contemporary art. Yet his tone is uniquely his own: less theatrical than Christian Boltanski, more inward than Tracey Emin, and more textured than typical post-conceptual painting. --- Conclusion In this work, Gela Mikava emerges not simply as a painter or object-maker, but as a choreographer of presence and withdrawal. His practice pushes against familiar tropes and opens space for new emotional architectures - fragile, intimate, unrepeatable. He does not illustrate absence; he composes with it. And in doing so, he gives voice to a new kind of language - one that does not declare itself, but waits to be felt.

    11 July 2025

    Inside The Studio 2025

    Inside The Studio 2025

    27 April 2025

    Inside The Studio

    Inside The Studio

    18 March 2025

    Inside The Studio

    15 March 2025

    Inside The Studio

    Inside The Studio

    01 March 2025

    Personal Exhibition

    Personal Exhibition

    17 February 2025

    Personal Exhibition

    Personal Exhibition

    "My work has a theme of soul making and inner world activation/guidance. For me paintings are a portal into the unknown, they can take us beyond the surface of life and into the depth of Being. The immediacy of paint is the perfect accompaniment to meditation for exploring a level of consciousness where everything is connected."

    07 January 2025

    Dance of the Wolves

    Dance of the Wolves

    This piece is a visual exploration of the tension between instinct and identity, chaos and order. The intertwining figures and the wolf-like form at the center represent the struggle between our primal nature and the constructed layers of humanity. Through bold strokes and earthy tones, I invite the audience to reflect on transformation and the blurred boundaries between the wild and the civilized. This painting is not just a story of conflict but a celebration of the interconnectedness of all living things—an ode to the dance of survival, transformation, and unity.

    07 January 2025

    Inside The Studio

    Inside The Studio

    Without the ability to actualize an idea or concept, art would not exist. My work is a constant search for the best way to interpret the ideas that I have about myself and the world I live in.

    07 January 2025

    Inside The Studio

    Inside The Studio

    14 December 2024

    The Bijouterie series

    The Bijouterie series

    Mixed media art 2024

    06 October 2024