Black Sea

In the exhibition "Black Sea" 68 Projects presents works by the Georgian painter Levan Songulashvili and Berlin painter Christian Awe. The show combines powerful, life-affirming colour compositions by Awe with the black and white philosophical approach to painting by Songulashvili. Two artists, two flows, two worlds: together at 68 Projects.

The motives and emotional medium is water — its energy, its depth and intangibility, its fire, its colours. The elixir of life that, like the air we breathe, is fleeting and unfathomable, yet unlike air leaves no more than a wet glow upon the skin. Water that is colourless and yet reflects all colours. Water that creates fertility, quenches thirst; the fire that purifies, carries and floods us, that stands still or flows to the sea, which is never the same when we dive in it. Part of the myth of life and the hereafter that erases the memory and yet stores all memory as it flows through the layers of rock.

The depths of the oil paintings of the young Georgian artist Levan Songulashvili evoke the underworld and the River Styx, where marsh plants and jellyfish surround the dead, translating the remnants of organic existence into their own to embrace and devour. Both at home in Tbilisi and in New York, he was Artist in Residence of Galerie Kornfeld / 68 Projects in Berlin for three months, where four large-format oil paintings were created and exhibited as a continuation of his STYX series.

In Levan Songulashvili's work everything is revealed and made visible; including colours that meld into the shadowy, suggestive, changeable, and back to that dreamlike realm where knowledge and ignorance, where the conscious, half-conscious and unconscious, flow underwater. Songulashvili is one of the most promising contemporary artists of today.