Parmen Daushvili masterfully captures the contemporary experience through the prism of daily routine. Lithe and loosely rendered, Daushvili’s introspective portraits and atmospheric interiors draw inspiration from his immediate surroundings: the cool, oblique London light that floods his beige and muted green flat; passers-by on his street; acquaintances and members of his immediate family. Architectural details wander from painting to painting, gaining a symbolic gravity as his compositions are subjected to an ever harsher painterly process of reduction. 

Daushvili’s paintings are survivors of their own making. Many of his works are over-painted, scraped, sanded, re-painted and transformed. The palette is somber and measured, evoking at times mid 20th century modern British and American masterworks by Milton Avery, LS Lowry and David Hockney. He is economical with his brushwork and the resulting pictures possess a quiet intensity; a sense of yearning and grappling; a hopefulness and uneasiness. The artist began painting as a pastime in 2003, but chose to be a full time painter after fleeing to the United Kingdom from Tbilisi, Georgia soon after the Russian occupation in 2008. Reappearing motifs like the crocodile point to the artist’s biographical context – toward his experience of migration and displacement – and evoke a liminal state between ordinary life and a vivid dream state.

Daushvili (b. 1970, Tbilisi, Georgia) lives and works in London. He has presented solo exhibitions at Polina Berlin Gallery, New York (2025, 2023); Ruttkowski;68, Düsseldorf, Germany (2025); Patricia Low Contemporary, Gstaad, Switzerland (2025); Nathalie Karg Gallery, New York (2024); and Grand Gallery, Malmö, Sweden (2023). His work has been included in the annual exhibitions of the Royal Society of Portrait Painters, the Royal Society of British Artists and the Royal Academy of Arts Summer Exhibition. Daushvili was selected for inclusion in the BP Portrait Award (2014, 2019, 2020) at London’s National Portrait Gallery.