Original artwork description:

In this painting, I explore the slow erasure of identity under the weight of inherited silence. The face, barely visible and submerged in sweeping layers of blue and burning flesh tones, becomes a ghost of the self — a figure who is neither fully present nor completely gone. It is a portrait of someone born into a story they didn’t choose, fading between the lines of memory and oblivion.

The striped textile at the bottom is not decorative. It is a fragment of post-socialist material culture, a worn relic of domestic life — rigid, masculine, institutional. It contrasts violently with the abstracted dissolution above, forming a visual border between control and collapse.

This work is part of an ongoing investigation into post-socialist radiation — the silent, residual trauma that lingers in bodies, objects, and gestures. It asks: Who are we, when the past no longer speaks but still dictates form?

Materials used:

Mixed media on canvas and Clear Cellophane Wrap...

Tags:
#mixed media #abstract portrait #abstracted face #white color #emotive portrait #figurative abstraction #contemporary absract #curators choice #post socialist 

Abstracted face Series (2024) Mixed-media painting
by Gela MIKAVA

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Original artwork description
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In this painting, I explore the slow erasure of identity under the weight of inherited silence. The face, barely visible and submerged in sweeping layers of blue and burning flesh tones, becomes a ghost of the self — a figure who is neither fully present nor completely gone. It is a portrait of someone born into a story they didn’t choose, fading between the lines of memory and oblivion.

The striped textile at the bottom is not decorative. It is a fragment of post-socialist material culture, a worn relic of domestic life — rigid, masculine, institutional. It contrasts violently with the abstracted dissolution above, forming a visual border between control and collapse.

This work is part of an ongoing investigation into post-socialist radiation — the silent, residual trauma that lingers in bodies, objects, and gestures. It asks: Who are we, when the past no longer speaks but still dictates form?

Materials used:

Mixed media on canvas and Clear Cellophane Wrap...

Tags:
#mixed media #abstract portrait #abstracted face #white color #emotive portrait #figurative abstraction #contemporary absract #curators choice #post socialist 
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Gela MIKAVA

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Location Georgia

About
Gela Mikava (b. 1995, Zugdidi, Georgia) Lives and works in Tbilisi Gela Mikava is a Georgian visual artist whose practice centers on inherited trauma, material memory, and the long afterlife of collapsed... Read more

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