Tamo Jugeli
From 5 to 7
March 18 - April 30, 2026
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Polina Berlin Gallery and Karma are pleased to present an exhibition of new paintings by Tamo Jugeli, From 5 to 7, opening on Wednesday, March 18. The exhibition will span both galleries, and will run through April 30, 2026.
Tamo Jugeli begins at the edge. Even in abstraction, painters typically build out their compositions from a central form, resolving the boundaries of the canvas in response to its demands. Jugeli’s works instead radiate inward from an initial gesture in the margins. In her words, “The edges aren’t closed.” Each painting could extend into the one beside it, or some other realm entirely.
The Georgian, New York–based artist forgoes studies or drawings, working directly in oil in response to earlier forms, tones, or the act of mark-making itself. Jugeli made the large-scale abstractions in From 5 to 7 over the past year, creating the paintings for Karma and Polina Berlin Gallery, respectively, over discrete periods of time. The result is two distinctive but linked bodies of work: the parallel presentations share sensibilities and formal resonances, but each suite has its own set of internal logics. Certain forms recur—gently shapeshifting with each iteration—but rather than solidifying as motifs, their reappearance is, she says, “muscle memory.”
Whereas earlier paintings were denser, tightly composed of interlocking forms, her recent works are more gestural, unrulier. Here, the varied surface textures characteristic of her oeuvre have a liquid quality, as if Jugeli had prolonged oil’s essential fluidity indefinitely. Gauzy washes recede against swaths of glossy black applied thickly like hot tar. Periodically rotating the canvas as she works, Jugeli allows traces of this process to remain on the surface. Drips in vivid hues plummet or, as if pulled by an unearthly gravity, stream across or upward. Despite the expressionistic associations of the drip, Jugeli maintains a degree of control; where a slash of red, for instance, has bled only briefly, she retains a linear edge that forms a partial boundary within the composition.
The exhibition title references Agnès Varda’s 1962 film Cléo from 5 to 7, which follows a young woman through Paris as she kills two hours awaiting a potentially fatal diagnosis. Killing, filling, wiling away—all are means of resisting time closing in, of creating movement in suspension. Jugeli’s complexly layered paintings register, like sedimentation, time’s passage and accumulation. Her jostling modes, marks, and surfaces, however, speak to an elasticity that relates more closely to the feeling of time than its chronological framework. Unlike the film’s temporal enclosure, Jugeli’s paintings expand within and beyond their peripheries.
—Sophia Larigakis -
Tamo Jugeli (b. 1994, Tbilisi, Georgia) has presented 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). Group exhibitions include Galerie Balice Hertling, Paris (2023); Hill Art Foundation, New York (2023); and Svaneti Museum of History and Ethnography, Mestia, Georgia (2021). Her work resides in the collections of the Hessel Museum of Art, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York; the Hill Family Collection, New York; Alex Katz Foundation, New York; and the Delfina Foundation, London.
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Born
Tbilisi, Georgia 1994. Lives and works in New York, NY
Education
2017 | BSS, David Aghmashenebeli University of Georgia, Tbilisi, GE
One-Person Exhibitions
2026 From 5 to 7, Polina Berlin Gallery, New York, NY and Karma, New York, NY (3/18-4/30)
2025 I’d do it all again, Gladstone Gallery, Brussels, BE (5/15-7/5)
Hey, Karma, Los Angeles, CA (1/11-2/13)2024 A Clear Horizon, Tanya Leighton Gallery, Berlin, DE (9/9-11/9)
2023 …lightly, Polina Berlin Gallery, New York, NY (4/18-5/20)
2022 Random Order, Gallery Artbeat, Tbilisi, GE (2/12-3/27)
Solitaire, Polina Berlin Gallery, New York, NY (5/3-6/4)2021 Limen (with Nina Kintsurashvili), Svaneti Museum of History and Ethnography, Mestia, GE (6/5-7/25)
2020 Unnamed 2020, Gallery Artbeat, Tbilisi, GE (8/07-9/20)
2019 You Know What?! I don’t Have a Good Feeling about Cakes Around Here, Gallery Artbeat, Tbilisi, GE (2/21-4/7)
2018 Archetypes, Art | Up – Street Gallery, Batumi, GE
Selected Group Exhibitions
2025 A Certain Form of Hell, Karma, Thomaston, ME (7/20-8/31)
Itchy Bloom (curated by Carolin Eidner), Ruttkkowski 68, Düsseldorf, DE
(3/30-6/29)2024 A Particular Kind of Heaven, Karma, Thomaston, ME (7/21-9/1)
The rose is the rose and is the cat, Polina Berlin Gallery, New York, NY (6/4-8/2)
Figment: Tamo Jugeli and Maia Naveriani, Gallery Artbeat, Tbilisi, GE (4/11-6/16)
My Sister Named…, L'Atlas Gallery, Paris, France, organized with Gallery Artbeat, Tbilisi, GE (3/22-5/24)
Emotional Intelligence II, Polina Berlin Gallery, New York, NY (2/22-3/27)2023 I Was Only Dreaming (curated by Tony Cox),Club Rhubarb, New York, NY (12/1/23-1/28/24)
Soft Focus: Jessica Cannon, Parmen Daushvili, Tamo Jugeli, Carrie Rudd (curated by Polina Berlin),superzoom, Paris, FR (6/29-7/31)
Beautiful, Vivid, Self-Contained (curated by David Salle), Hill Art Foundation, New York, NY (4/21-7/31)2022 Unsafe at Any Speed, Morton St. Partners, New York, NY (3/15-5/8)
Emotional Intelligence, Polina Berlin Gallery, New York, NY (2/22-4/23)2021 Digital Natives, TBC Concept, Tbilisi, GE (10/28-12/28)
2019 Handler, Gallery Artbeat, Tbilisi, GE (6/1-8/25)
Awards, Fellowships and Residencies
2025 Residency, Dragon Hill, Mouans-Sartoux, France
2023 Residency, superzoom, Ardèche, France
2022 Residency, Art Athina, Athens, Greece
2019 Residency, Institut für Alles Mögliche, Berlin, Germany
2018 Residency, Art Villa Garikula, Garikula, Georgia
Notable Collections
Alex Katz Foundation, New York, NY
Delfina Foundation, London, UK
Hessel Museum of Art, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY
Hill Family Collection, New York, NY -