GELA MIKAVA (b. 1995, Zugdidi, Georgia) is a Georgian contemporary artist whose practice spans painting and mixed media. His work examines post-socialist memory, inherited trauma, identity, and the psychological afterlife of collapsed political and social systems.

Trained in architecture at Georgian Technical University (BA and MA), Mikava approaches painting as both image and constructed surface. Material plays a central role in his practice. Alongside conventional supports, he works with Soviet-era fabrics, particularly biazi—a mass-produced textile once widely used in domestic life across the Soviet Union. Removed from their original context, these fabrics become carriers of private memory and collective history.

Across his practice, Mikava returns to figures, fragmented bodies, animals, ornamental forms, and familiar objects whose meanings have become unstable. Rather than treating the post-Soviet condition as a fixed historical subject, he examines how its residues persist within everyday gestures, desires, images, and materials.

His recent bodies of work extend this investigation toward questions of repetition, artificiality, beauty, and emotional residue. Series including Post-Alienation, Artificial Flowers, and What Remains of Gesture explore what survives when human experience is repeatedly reproduced, aestheticized, displaced, or transformed into surface.

Mikava's work positions painting as a site where personal memory intersects with broader histories of ideology, consumer culture, displacement, and social transformation. Through material experimentation and an evolving visual language, he examines how images and objects continue to carry traces of systems that have ostensibly disappeared.