Eschewing any fixed meaning, Tamo Jugeli’s work approaches painting as an act in and of itself, contemplating states of becoming in both life and art. Her paintings proceed from her keen sense of intuition, guided only by instinct and memory. Form and color commingle, gestural marks abut flatly unadorned planes, fields of abstraction give way to familiar representational forms, whether still-life subjects or suggestions of the body. Emerging from a continual state of transformation, her paintings – and their making – speak to both the specificity and universality of being human.

Structured around a succession of discrete series, Jugeli’s body of work visits and revisits sites of experience, embedding perceptions of the artist’s surroundings in her work. Indicative of Jugeli’s incisive attention to ambient tonalities, a varied use of brushwork and color compose her poetic register. Marks that are open and broad, unruly and washy, are met with a staccato of energetic punctures. Her earthy reds, ochres, and browns may be framed by pungent teals and greens on a single canvas. If these works occasionally remind us of the historical past – the nearly Fauvist deployment of color, for instance, or the madcap compositions of Kippenberger – we might say that these semblances are born from a position of personal inquiry rather than one of winking reference. Each distinct body of work distills earlier sensations and sentiments, culminating in an emotional and existential sense of clarity.

Rejecting traditional art school, Jugeli began her career as a journalist and came to painting through an unorthodox, self-taught path. She first turned to art as a respite during an emotional crisis and later embraced it as her calling. Perhaps as a consequence, her intuitive movements across the canvas appear free from the strictures of the Western art historical canon. Her works, while painted without preconceived intention, are psychically informed by the rich cultural history, aesthetic eclecticism, expansive landscapes, and diffuse golden light of her native Tbilisi. Much like the place where she was born and raised, Jugeli processes and responds to the constant flux of time and space while remaining unequivocally herself.

Jugeli (b. Tbilisi, Georgia, 1994) has had solo exhibitions at Gladstone Gallery, Brussels (2025); Karma, Los Angeles (2025); Tanya Leighton Gallery, Berlin (2024); Polina Berlin Gallery, New York (2023, 2022); and Gallery Artbeat, Tbilisi (2022, 2020, 2019). Jugeli has participated in recent group exhibitions at Nathalie Karg Gallery, New York (2024); Galerie Balice Hertling, Paris (2023); Hill Art Foundation, New York (2023); and Svaneti Museum of History and Ethnography, Mestia, Georgia (2021), among others.