Tamuna Sirbiladze

"Sirbiladze digested the canon of painting, with its overwhelmingly male dramatis personae and their attendant concerns, and adapted its norms to fit a distinctly female-centric (if not explicitly feminist) point of view. If her expressive brushstrokes echo those of Willem de Kooning, to whom she is time and again compared, then her agenda was something else altogether. Indeed, it feels a bit disingenuous to speak of ‘expressive extremes’ in Sirbiladze’s oeuvre, that rhetorical trope often applied to de Kooning. Her oeuvre, the oil stick works in particular, are more a study in expressive nuance; her work more often derives its emotive affect not from a wildly arched brushstroke, but from the counterpoint of hand-rendered gesture with text, or from the modicum of formal means with which she animated her subjects. Especially in her late work, Sirbiladze often eschewed thick strata of paint or uninterrupted swathes of pigmented canvas for lengthy, sinuous lines that could communicate volumes in the span of a few expressive strokes." —Anna Kats, "Still life," Tamuna Sirbiladze, 2017