At the Zurab Tsereteli Museum of Modern Art in Tbilisi, Mikheil Gogava’s solo exhibition Imagination of Time (20 April–2 June) asks a deceptively simple question: what does it mean to remember, when memory itself refuses to stay still?
Gogava, a Georgian artist with more than twenty years of practice, has long worked at the intersection of figurative painting and conceptual thinking. His landscapes are inhabited by childhood toys, Soviet-era objects, industrial structures, and animals that coexist without explanation. Familiar things carry unfamiliar weight. That tension runs through everything here.
The series takes its title seriously. Time, for Gogava, is not a straight line but a rotating, multidimensional space that shifts with the angle of the gaze. Childhood is a world of boundless fantasy; toys become the architecture of that inner world, fragments of imagination made solid. When we look at planets, we see only the past. Water on canvas works the same way: fluid, transient, a surface where past, present, and imagination reflect together for a moment, like light on water, then disappear.
What gives the work its force is the balance between the personal and the collective. These are not nostalgic scenes. They carry subjective pain and a wider post-Soviet experience: the objects of one childhood standing in for a generation’s memory. Critics have placed Gogava somewhere between Neo Rauch and Paula Rego in spirit, and the comparison helps. Like them, he uses the recognisable to unsettle rather than comfort. A toy is never just a toy; a landscape is never just a view.
Gogava has built an international profile over two decades: exhibitions in Paris, London, Antwerp, Tallinn, Vilnius, and Astana; the Luxembourg Art Prize certificate; finalist at Italy’s Artkeys festival; residencies and joint shows including work with American artist Steve Vanoni in Tallinn after a residency at Okapi Galerii in Estonia. Works are held in private collections internationally and in the Odessa Literary Museum in Ukraine. Imagination of Time feels like a consolidation of that trajectory: a mature statement on memory, time, and the imagination that holds them both.
For Izba Arts readers, Gogava’s practice sits in a familiar territory. Artists across Central and Eastern Europe and the post-Soviet world have spent years asking how personal history survives inside collective rupture. Gogava does not lecture on that history. He paints it: childhood as structure, time as water, memory as something you can almost touch before it slips away.
Imagination of Time is on view at the Zurab Tsereteli Museum of Modern Art, Tbilisi, until 2 June 2026.
More: gogava.ge
