#Georgia #Germany, Karlo Kacharava presented at LC Queisser,Cologne through July 26, 2025
Chambers and Echoes at LC Queisser
Notes on Karlo Kacharava
by Martin Germann
Artist, poet, critic Karlo Kacharava (1964–1994) can be seen as a porous floodgate between eras and geographies, between artistic and social continental shifts straddling the outgoing 20th and incoming 21st centuries. His work helped pave the way for the emergence of one of the most vibrant art scenes in contemporary Eastern Europe—specifically, in Georgia—while remaining deeply entangled, both personally and politically, with the Soviet past, before Georgia became independent in 1991 for a second time after 1918. Waves of cultural and political ruptures from those periods and beyond are still present in Georgia today.
Yet, Kacharava’s practice could only flourish through his long-imagined version of the Western landscape—manifested in an avalanche of writings, paintings, and drawings, often all at once—which comprise his enduring legacy, left behind when he died at the young age of 30. This exhibition in Cologne, the first of LC Queisser’s new gallery dependance, serves as the first occasion to present only drawings and works on paper by the artist—the medium that combines the various angles which informed his practice in the most appropriate way. In parallel, the Rhineland was first an imaginary and later a more concrete fixpoint in Kacharava’s work, as we will see later.
To understand Kacharava’s position, a brief glimpse into his environment is essential. His apartment, which I had the opportunity to visit last autumn, serves simultaneously as genius loci, shrine, and time capsule. Located in a suburban area of Tbilisi within a Khrushchev-era multistory housing block, Kacharava lived there his entire life with his mother and younger sister. His sister, who now preserves his legacy, has left the furniture untouched since his untimely death in 1994, changing only the arrangement of his works displayed on the walls and tables. Bookshelves are filled with photographs, as well as countless art catalogues and literary works of Georgian, Russian, and European origin. Beneath its nostalgic mundaneness, it becomes clear that this apartment was the neuralgic point of Kacharava’s production.