Biography

Levan Songulashvili (b. 1991, Tbilisi, Georgia) is a Georgian-born, New York–based artist working across painting, drawing, installation, sound, and moving image. His practice examines the unstable boundary between individual consciousness and collective existence, and the ways memory, migration, belief, and history shape identity.

Born as Georgia restored its independence amid the collapse of the Soviet Union, Songulashvili belongs to a generation shaped by the dissolution of one social order and the emergence of another. This historical rupture informs a body of work in which identity is understood not as fixed, but as continually formed and reconstituted through memory, migration, social systems, and the pressures of history.

Moving between figuration and abstraction, Songulashvili has developed a visual language of atmospheric and psychological intensity. Figures emerge from or dissolve into crowds, fields, processions, and spectral formations; the human body becomes simultaneously subject and structure. A self-taught pianist, he also draws on musical principles, rhythm, recurrence, variation, and silence, to shape the movement, duration, and emotional architecture of his images.

Songulashvili received his BFA from the Tbilisi State Academy of Arts and his MFA from the New York Academy of Art. His work is held in the collections of the Brooklyn Museum, New York; the BREUS Foundation; the Georgian Museum of Fine Arts, Tbilisi; the State Art Museum of Adjara, Batumi; and other public and private collections. His work has been exhibited internationally at the Royal Academy of Arts, London; the Brooklyn Museum, New York; the D. Shevardnadze National Gallery, Tbilisi; Saatchi Gallery, London; KORNFELD Galerie, Berlin; and Objectifs, Centre for Photography and Film, Singapore.

In 2018, composer Giya Kancheli encountered Songulashvili’s Idem et Idem during the artist’s solo exhibition. The work subsequently gave its title to Kancheli’s final choral composition, for which Songulashvili created a monumental stage installation for the 2019 world premiere. His interdisciplinary projects have also included a collaboration with Issey Miyake and participation in Jeremy Deller’s Iggy Pop Life Class at the Brooklyn Museum.

His honors include the President of Georgia Award, Artist of the Year, and recognition in Forbes 30 Under 30.