About
“Born from my own tragedies, these works reach beyond despair, tied to the fall of light and the drift of neutrinos, where energy never dies, only transforms like the soul. Like a ray of light, a human fall becomes something new and drifts into infinity, unseen but never gone.”
— Maka Zedelashvili
Through processes of layering, ritual citation, and the reworking of inherited form, Maka Zedelashvili has constructed a body of work in which the symbolic vocabularies of Georgian folk belief and Orthodox tradition are turned toward an interrogation of female interiority, surveillance, and the codes by which a life is authored before it is lived. Moving between painting, drawing, installation, and digital and immersive media, she allows the archaic and the immediate to converge on a single surface.
Born and raised in Tbilisi, Zedelashvili completed her training at the Tbilisi State Academy of Arts, later extending it with a Master’s in Fine Arts and Digital Modeling. Across more than three decades of practice, her interests have spanned Orthodox iconography and Georgian symbolic tradition, the cosmology of sacred trees and pagan rite preserved within superstition and gesture, the poetics of women’s interior and political life in the post-Soviet Caucasus, and the formal grammars of post-Soviet abstraction. Dis-Virgin (2018), her solo exhibition at the Museum of Literature, Tbilisi, was developed over three years.
A central preoccupation is the figure of the watched woman. In Eye That Always Watches, Zedelashvili centers a Georgian woman seeking autonomy within a collective field in which religious doctrine and communal judgment operate as a single apparatus of observation. The works in the series, among them Eyes, which always watch you, Seven, and Regression of Community, render this gaze materially, as a recurring optical motif embedded in the painted surface that returns the viewer’s look and carries an older devotional weight.
In PROMPT, Zedelashvili extends this inquiry into the field of inheritance itself. The series proceeds from the figure of the prompt as an inherited code, a script that authors a life in advance. Drawing on the ancient goddesses of fate who measure the thread at birth, she examines how patriarchal tradition assigns roles of submission or power and inscribes them onto the body, the home, and the family line. The project asks whether such a code can be rewritten, and by whose hand.
Echo of the Fall, developed during her 2025 residency at the Ria Keburia Foundation in Kachreti and presented there before traveling to Atelier Hamann, Hanover, marks a turn toward a more cosmological vocabulary. The series binds the figure of the fall, read across registers of liberation, crisis, and spiritual descent, to a physics of conservation: light descends, neutrinos drift, energy persists across changing states. The exhibition’s central installation suspends a transparent cylindrical form from ceiling to floor, holding within it a body-object wound by spirals of violet neon and reflected in surrounding mirrors. The figure becomes a field of soul and body frozen in infinity, an echo of falling rather than the consequence of having fallen.
The Inheritance of Forsaken Warmth, produced during a 2025 residency in Cannes, runs as a quieter strand. The drawings trace what Zedelashvili identifies as a universal threshold, the day a parent sets a child down and never lifts them again, and frame the gesture itself as inherited: every parent who sets a child down was once set down themselves.
Zedelashvili participated in the XV Florence Biennale in 2025, with parallel solo presentations of Echo of the Fall at the Ria Keburia Foundation and Atelier Hamann. In 2026 her work is included in the Tbilisi Art Fair, the Empower Her Art Forum at the Grand Egyptian Museum in Cairo, and Art in a Burning House in Vienna and Tbilisi. Her work is held in collections including the Georgian National Museum, the Zurab Tsereteli Museum of Modern Art, the Tbilisi History Museum, the Baku State Museum, and the Museum of Literature, Tbilisi.
Synthesizing Georgian ritual cosmology with the questions of contemporary practice, Zedelashvili counters the inherited scripts of femininity, judgment, and tradition without disavowing the symbolic worlds in which they are embedded. In her paintings and installations, abstraction and figuration are permitted to coexist as portals onto a field in which the inherited gaze is met and, in being met, begins to be transformed.
Selected Exhibitions, Residencies & Projects
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Week of Art - Holoseum, Tbilisi, Georgia
TAF – Tbilisi Art Fair, Georgia
Empower Her Art Forum - Grand Egyptian Museum
Art in a Burning House - Vienna, Austria
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XV Florence Biennale - Florence, Italy
Echo of the Fall - Solo Exhibition, AtelierHamann, Hanover, Germany
Solo Exhibition - Ria Keburia Foundation, Georgia
Art Residency - Ria Keburia Foundation, Georgia
Art Residency - Cannes, France
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Solo Exhibition “Kaleidoscope” - Artup Gallery
Group Exhibition - Heidelberg, Germany
Under the Sky of Georgia - National Folklore Center of Georgia
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Empower Her Art Forum - National Museum of Egyptian Civilization, Egypt
Group Exhibition - Belgium
Charity Auction in Support of Ukraine
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Group Exhibition – Galerie Hampel, Heidelberg, Germany
Group Exhibition – New Jorg Gallery, Kalmthout, Belgium
Group Exhibition – Centre Culturel International de Hammamet, Tunisia
Group Exhibition – Wasserturm, Rhein-Neckar-Kreis, Baden-Württemberg, Germany
Group Exhibition – Schwetzingen Art Initiative at Lutherhaus, Germany
Group Exhibition – Telliskivi Loomelinnak, Creative City Gallery, Tallinn, Estonia
International Festival - Selected Artist, Recipient of the Silver Sponsor RAY-11 Award
Group Exhibition – “Old Tbilisi” – National Library of the Parliament of Georgia
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Online Exhibition “Fictional Reality” – Contemporary Art Residence, Tbilisi
Group exhibition – Tbilisi International Animation Festival (TIAF 2021), Georgia
Digital Exhibition Week for Women Artists – Online Exhibition
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2019 Solo exhibition – Literary Museum
2018 Solo Exhibition “Dis-Virgin” – Literary Museum / Museum of Literature, Art Gallery “Vake”
2018: “BI Auction” – Solo exhibition
2018: Solo exhibition “Women – Life and Energy Source” – Digital Art – Fabrika