Polina Berlin Gallery is pleased to present Green Light, Parmen Daushvili’s second solo exhibition at the gallery, on view from September 9 through October 11, 2025. Comprising a new body of paintings, the exhibition extends Daushvili’s abiding engagement with diaristic forms of representation, expressive painterly devices, and the internal effects of one’s external surroundings. 

Since immigrating to London from his native Tbilisi in 2008, Daushvili has pursued painting full-time, contributing to a rich trajectory of British painting concerned with depictions of domestic life. One might occasionally be reminded of the early modernists of the Bloomsbury Group, painters like Duncan Grant and Vanessa Bell, or otherwise sense the psychological intensity elicited by Lucian Freud. Even more often, one recalls the expressionist Beaux Arts Quartet, midcentury painters referred to as practitioners of “kitchen sink realism” for their wry elucidation of social conditions centered around household objects and quotidian situations. Approaching this lineage intuitively, from the incisive perspective of an outsider, Daushvili often accounts for contemporary experience through the prism of daily routine. Take Channel 4, 2024, for instance, in which the artist watches television, or Free Dinner, 2024, in which the artist’s dog begs for scraps. In both, ostensibly unremarkable moments are transformed into poignant scenes of dark comedy through perspective and framing, not to mention a coolly muted color palette; like many of his predecessors, the artist conjures an interior landscape in which playfulness and deadpan humor may sit alongside lingering suggestions of confinement and unease.

What Daushvili might also share with these earlier artists is the conviction that social realism need not conform to perceptible reality. Although Daushvili draws upon subjects with which – and with whom – he is intimately familiar, these paintings stem from a process of free association, a stream-of-conscious invocation of lived experience and residual memory. Family members, friends, and the artist himself all form a cast of reappearing characters, resurfacing across multiple paintings, placed in circumstances that seem to emerge at once from actuality and invention. Departing from the more straightforward images of domesticity, works like the noirish Passenger, 2025, call into question our initial impression that what we’re seeing has been taken directly from first-hand observation. At the same time, paintings such as Figure in Repose (After Titian), 2025, operate inversely, assuring us of the image’s veracity by inscribing its sitter irreverently in the long tradition of figure painting. Elsewhere, recurrent motifs like the crocodile, which indelibly appears in several canvasses, may point to the artist’s biographical context – toward his experience of migration and displacement – but they also situate us within a liminal state teetering between sleep and waking. If we suspect that certain elements of these works can only be read symbolically – the halting giraffe of Spotted, 2025, serves as a notable example – than we might say we find ourselves in a kind of lucid dreamscape, one in which instances of mundanity mingle freely with errant thoughts, tentative associations, and hazy allegories.

Just as the depicted material appears to chronicle a shifting psychic terrain, the paintings themselves seem to serve as indexical records of the artist’s arduous sessions in the studio. Indicative of Daushvili’s instinctive habit of working and reworking his compositions over time, abandoned forms are left partially exposed, while others are dramatically occluded, buried beneath layers of paint. Traces of the artist’s haptic brushwork remain, as do vestigial spots left by scraping and sanding. Through this process, the resultant work becomes less a fixed image than a dynamic inscription of marks and their negation, positioning the canvas itself as a sort of palimpsest analogous to the formation of thought and memory.

Yet the image’s instability, its capacity to change in form and meaning, also becomes its source of contemplative pleasure. In this sense, Green Light is not only an evocative expression, but also a lens through which to view the work. Dependably bathed in fluctuating, verdant hues, an ambient tonality Daushvili associates particularly with London, each canvas conveys a multivalent inventory of deeply personal and broadly cultural registers. Seen together, they reveal how fleeting impressions, half-remembered occurrences, and banal encounters might function as fertile points of departure, and how painting might address itself to a wider span of history in the everyday, in the present tense.

Parmen Daushvili (b. 1970, Tbilisi, Georgia) lives and works in London. He has presented solo exhibitions at Ruttkowski;68, Düsseldorf, Germany (2025); Patricia Low Contemporary, Gstaad, Switzerland (2025); Nathalie Karg Gallery, New York (2024); Grand Gallery, Malmö, Sweden (2023); and Polina Berlin Gallery, New York (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.

Born

• Tbilisi, Georgia, 1970. Lives and works in London, UK

One-Person Exhibitions

• 2025 Green Light, Polina Berlin Gallery, New York, NY (9/9-10/11)
  The Waiting Game, Ruttkowski;68, Düsseldorf, DE (5/16-6/22)

• 2024 All the Mafia Missing from the World, Patricia Low Contemporary, Gstaad, CH (12/26/24-2/2/25)
  Lonely Planet, Nathalie Karg Gallery, New York, NY (3/5-4/20)

• 2023 Approacher, Grand Gallery, Malmö, SE (5/5-6/3)
  Novela, Polina Berlin Gallery, New York, NY (2/7-3/4)

Selected Group Exhibitions

• 2025 Mixed Pickles, Ruttkowski;68, Bochum, DE (3/2-4/13) (4/-5/10)

• 2024 Rue Charlot: Edition 2, Ruttkowski;68, Paris, FR (11/27/24-1/9/25)
  Sheep and Stones, Gallery 4710, Tbilisi, GE (2/10-3/27)
  Air Service Basel, Lo Brutto Stahl, Basel, CH (6/10-6/16)

• 2023 Soft Focus, Polina Berlin Gallery in collaboration with superzoom, Paris, FR (6/29-7/31)

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