GELA MIKAVA

Biography

Born in 1995 in Zugdidi, Georgia, Mikava studied architecture at Georgian Technical University, completing his bachelor’s degree in 2018 and his master’s degree in 2021.

He seeks out cotton fabric known as biazi in old homes, recovering it from ceilings where it was stretched, coated with glue and covered with paper. Remaining adhesive, attached paper, water stains and wear become working conditions for his paintings. Their unevenness affects how colour penetrates the fabric, how layers adhere and how forms emerge.

This material attention has a personal source. In the home his parents bought during their displacement, Mikava watched rainwater stain the fabric-and-paper ceiling. Searching the changing marks for shapes offered pleasure and discovery, alongside shame about the condition of the house. The experience continues to inform his way of looking and working.

Across different series, portraits, bodies, animals, flowers and text undergo covering, fragmentation and reconstruction. Each series develops its own concerns through an ongoing engagement with the relationship between an image and the changing surface that carries it.

Artist statement

I look for old ceiling fabric because its previous life changes what I can paint. Glue, paper and stains affect every new intervention. I encounter a surface already shaped by other people’s actions, domestic use and time.

For me, the painting begins before my first mark. Stretching the fabric across a ceiling, attaching paper, water seeping through it and later taking it down are all part of the history I work with. I cannot recover every event behind its traces, but their physical effects remain present.

I paint on fabric and paper, stitch and attach materials, cover existing images and allow colour to seep through from behind. I return to the same area repeatedly, responding to forms that emerge through both deliberate decisions and unplanned changes. Faces, bodies and familiar motifs become visible, disappear or acquire different relationships.

My intervention joins an existing sequence of transformations. I am interested in how earlier traces shape what can appear now, and how a new image changes our attention to the surface beneath it.