She grew up in Paris in a Franco-Georgian family: this cultural mix and her twin-ness brought her face-to-face with the question of identity very early on. For several years now, she has been reflecting on the representation of the human being. What is the relationship between our body and space, and how does it fit into its environment?
She has come to question the notions of identity and the individual, otherness and the relationship with the other: the relationship between man and his own body, the highly individual way in which each of us inhabits it, and above all the positioning of this body in social space, and the disorders that can result from a difficulty in precisely “finding one’s place”.
Studying and representing the relationship between individuals is a way for the artist to approach the question of relationships in general, which interests her because it can be transposed to many different scales: the intimate, the family, but also politics.
Graduated from the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs de Paris in 2019, she since develops a body of portrait work in ink drawing (applied with a brush) and oil painting, showing human-sized bodies, isolated from their environment and floating in the empty space of canvas or paper.
Gabrielle Kourdadzé draws her inspiration from photographs taken in the street or on public transport, but also from newsreel photos from which she extracts certain details to create my own characters. Some are represented alone, others are superimposed on one another – a way for her to make them cohabit within the same space… without actually bringing them together. This pictorial motif of superimposition, inherited from her silkscreen and printmaking practices, makes sense to the artist: superimposing two bodies, two images, two different forms leads us to question the relationship they have with each other, to look for links and imagine a relationship… to establish a narrative.
The zone of interaction between these subjects creates another image, another colour, just as the interaction between two singular individuals cannot be reduced to the sum of these individuals: it is “something else”.
Médias :
7 November 2023