The BIJOUTERIE is a painterly investigation into the symbolic weight of ornament and the sociocultural narratives embedded in objects of desire. In this series, GELA MIKAVA isolates earrings, rings, and artificial gemstones not as decorative afterthoughts but as central motifs—silent witnesses to systems of value, identity, and illusion.

Rather than celebrating luxury, The BIJOUTERIE questions it. The works unearth the psychological and societal layers behind the pursuit of adornment, revealing how surface and sparkle often mask absence, insecurity, or longing. These pieces reflect a tension between the external shine and the inner void—a commentary on the way wealth is performed, inherited, or yearned for in contemporary society.

With a deliberately restrained palette and raw, textured surfaces, MIKAVA shifts the focus from the precious to the precarious. The jewelry here is not worn but watched—disconnected from the body and elevated to the status of totems, both sacred and hollow. Each work becomes a still moment where beauty, excess, and human vulnerability collide.

Predators and Herbivores

In Predators and Herbivores, Gela Mikava orchestrates a visual language that fuses personal memory with the residues of systemic power. The series navigates the psychic aftermath of the post-socialist condition, not through direct narration, but via material metaphors, spectral forms, and symbolic structures.

What initially appears as abstract layering slowly reveals the tension between domination and vulnerability. Figures emerge and recede, obscured by expressive stains, trembling outlines, and most notably — the presence of striped textile patterns. These stripes are not merely decorative: they echo the rigid verticality of Soviet high-rise architecture, evoking prison bars, institutional design, and the repetition of ideologically controlled space. Mikava employs these patterns to blur the boundaries between bodies and buildings, between soft skin and hard façade, between individuals and collectivized control.

While the title suggests a binary — predator vs. herbivore, oppressor vs. innocent — Mikava deliberately collapses this dichotomy. The human figures are fragmented, ghostly, almost archetypal. Their identities are obscured, resisting easy classification. The stripe becomes both a veil and a cage, suggesting that violence and fragility often coexist in the same body, the same system, the same memory.

Importantly, this series is not painted on neutral canvas but on reclaimed Soviet-era textiles, or material evoking that aesthetic. The medium itself becomes an archive — a mute witness to the lived experience of ideology. This choice binds Mikava’s painterly gesture to the material history of post-socialist space, creating works that are not only paintings but surfaces of memory, resistance, and psychological archaeology.

In Predators and Herbivores, Gela Mikava offers no clear allegory, no moral clarity. Instead, the series unfolds as a slow-burning tension — between the soft and the hard, the seen and the erased, the past and its radiation in the present.

Veil of Flesh is part of an ongoing portrait series that explores the tension between visibility and dissolution. In this work, the human face emerges only partially—blurred, softened, almost spectral. There is no clear line between the subject and the background; identity appears to bleed into its surroundings, as though consciousness is dissolving into the canvas itself.

Rather than offering a likeness, the painting suggests a presence on the verge of disappearance. The figure is not defined by expression, gesture, or narrative—but by absence, erasure, and fragility. This deliberate ambiguity evokes a psychological space where selfhood becomes porous, vulnerable, and ungraspable.

In an era saturated with sharp, curated images of the self, Veil of Flesh proposes a different kind of portraiture—one that honors what is uncertain, hidden, or fading. It is not a depiction of who someone is, but a meditation on what remains when identity starts to vanish.

Dance of the Wolves is a contemporary allegorical painting series that explores the primal forces driving human behavior through the symbolic figure of the wolf. Blending abstract expression and dynamic figuration, the works depict wolves not as wild creatures of nature alone, but as reflections of our inner instincts—loyalty and betrayal, hunger and restraint, individuality and the collective.

Each canvas captures a tense choreography—a visual "dance"—where wolves appear locked in movement: circling, confronting, collapsing, or rising. This motion embodies both the beauty and brutality of survival, the unspoken language of power, and the delicate balance between dominance and vulnerability.

The series invites viewers to question: are we watching animals, or are we seeing ourselves? In a world shaped by invisible hierarchies and instinctual decisions, Dance of the Wolves becomes a mirror held up to society—a stage where the rawness of existence performs without masks.

"Echoes of Collapse" is Gela Mikava’s latest body of work, a visceral and introspective response to the increasingly unstable global atmosphere — one defined by tension, disinformation, protest without resolution, and war.

In this series, Mikava captures the emotional and psychological weight of modern existence. Through layered abstraction, expressive linework, and dripping, almost dissolving forms, the paintings convey a haunting sense of fragmentation and suppression. Figures emerge and fade within a fog of color and texture, embodying both the individual's cry for clarity and society’s gradual descent into noise and uncertainty.

Rather than offering direct narratives, these works serve as meditative portals — where the viewer is invited to feel the claustrophobia of media saturation, the weight of collective disillusionment, and the quiet endurance of resistance.

"Echoes of Collapse" reflects a world on edge — where every moment echoes with collapse, and every brushstroke seeks to grasp what remains human within it.

This work does not merely depict chaos—it lives within it. Displaced Realities is an exploration of the precariousness of human experience, where what appears stable is constantly on the verge of collapse. It speaks to the fragility of structures—mental, physical, societal—that we rely on to define our place in the world. The composition fractures time and perception, reflecting a deep internal dissonance where the body and mind fall out of rhythm with their environment.

Here, reality is never fixed; it is fluid, unsettled, and endlessly reconfigured. The figures—often distorted, incomplete, or caught in ambiguous motion—represent the tension between presence and absence, identity and dissolution. They inhabit a space that is both familiar and alien, echoing the psychological states of displacement, dissociation, and longing for coherence.

The painting captures the ceaseless transformation of the human condition—a search for equilibrium that remains just out of reach. It questions whether such alignment is ever truly possible, or if the human experience is defined by its very instability. In this landscape of fragmentation, the viewer is invited to confront their own shifting perceptions and the silent, often invisible ruptures that shape their understanding of self and world.

In this painting, I tried to capture the quiet cry for closeness — the kind that doesn't scream, but sinks into you.

Fading bodies, reaching hands, and deep blue silence.

Sometimes, all we want is not to disappear