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Original artwork description:
This painting explores the visual language of branding as a modern form of power. The familiar Marlboro logo appears worn, eroded, and partially erased — no longer an advertisement, but a scar.
The cold, sterile blue contrasts with heavy, raw red tones, suggesting a tension between image and consequence, promise and residue. What is marketed as freedom and control reveals its opposite: dependency, emptiness, and the quiet violence inflicted on the body.
The central void functions like a missing breath — a symbolic absence at the heart of the brand. The work is not about smoking alone, but about systems that aestheticize harm while concealing its cost.
Painted in 2019, this piece marks a transition in my practice from psychological figuration toward social and symbolic critique.
Materials used:
acrylic and oil on linen canvas
Tags:
#conceptual art #social commentary #blue abstract #contemporary abstraction #consumer culture #modern symbolism #corporate power #brand critique #visual protest #capitalist imageryMarlboro (2022) Mixed-media painting
by Gela MIKAVA
1 Artist Reviews
£1,479.97
- Mixed-media painting on Canvas
- One of a kind artwork
- Size: 80 x 100 x 3cm (unframed)
- Signed on the front
- Style: Expressive and gestural
- Subject: Abstract and non-figurative
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Original artwork description
This painting explores the visual language of branding as a modern form of power. The familiar Marlboro logo appears worn, eroded, and partially erased — no longer an advertisement, but a scar.
The cold, sterile blue contrasts with heavy, raw red tones, suggesting a tension between image and consequence, promise and residue. What is marketed as freedom and control reveals its opposite: dependency, emptiness, and the quiet violence inflicted on the body.
The central void functions like a missing breath — a symbolic absence at the heart of the brand. The work is not about smoking alone, but about systems that aestheticize harm while concealing its cost.
Painted in 2019, this piece marks a transition in my practice from psychological figuration toward social and symbolic critique.
Materials used:
acrylic and oil on linen canvas
Tags:
#conceptual art #social commentary #blue abstract #contemporary abstraction #consumer culture #modern symbolism #corporate power #brand critique #visual protest #capitalist imagery
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Gela MIKAVA
Georgia
About
Gela Mikava (b. 1995, Zugdidi, Georgia)
Lives and works in TbilisiGela Mikava is a Georgian visual artist whose practice centers on inherited trauma, material memory, and the long afterlife of collapsed... Read more