GELA MIKAVA
Material study — a painting, seen closeFilm from the artist’s studio · Silent
Painting · Textile · Installation

GELA MIKAVA

Tbilisi, Georgia

Painting on surfaces already shaped by time.

Gela Mikava is a Georgian artist based in Tbilisi. Working primarily with salvaged Soviet-era ceiling fabric, he makes paintings in which inherited traces and new images continually reshape one another.

SELECTED WORKS EXPLORE THE SERIES
Selected / 2025Saatchi Art Rising Stars ↗

Selected works

VIEW THE ARCHIVE
Complete blue painting with fragmented floral forms and layers of erasure by GELA MIKAVA
Artificial FlowersView work ↗
Pressure Field — complete painting
Pressure FieldView work ↗

Exhibitions

ALL EXHIBITIONS
Material & memory

A surface with
a previous life.

Biazi — cotton fabric once used in Soviet domestic interiors — enters the studio carrying stains, wear and the memory of inhabited rooms.

Children’s drawings and painterly gestures meet this inherited surface. Some marks remain legible. Others survive as fragments.

READ THE PRACTICE TEXT
Artificial Flowers Predators & Herbivores What Remains of Gesture The Bijouterie

Selected texts & press

ALL TEXTS
Saatchi Art

Rising Stars 2025

LPC Contemporary

Material as a Vessel of Memory

Ateliera · The Drip

Gela Mikava Paints on What the System Left Behind

Paintings, drawings, reclaimed fabric and an easel in Gela Mikava’s studio
Studio view · Photograph: Mariam Doijashvili
From the studio / Tbilisi

Work begins
with what remains.

Painting and mixed media informed by architecture, material memory and the psychological aftereffects of history.

BIOGRAPHY & STUDIO INQUIRIES & STUDIO VISITS