სარკმლიდან დანახული ძაფის ამბავი

The Why Not Gallery is pleased to present Erekle Chinchilakashvili's first solo exhibition at the gallery, “The Story of a Thread Seen Through the Window.”

The idea of the exhibition originates from the gallery's new location, Fabrika Tbilisi. The exhibition space is the starting point for research. For the artist, studying the past of the space is a form of entering into dialogue with it. The artist's inspiration is connected to one specific historical layer of the Fabrika building: in the 1970s-80s, the “Nino” sewing factory operated here. This urban fact becomes the narrative basis of the project and connects to the collective memory of Ninoshvili Street, the surrounding neighborhood, and the left bank of the Mtkvari River.

The exhibition is based on the artist's literary sketch with two fictional characters. Their memories create a narrative framework from which pictorial motifs, architectural forms, and visual symbols emerge. The works enter into a dialogue with the Tbilisi portrait tradition, 16th–17th century Dutch painting, the work of David Kakabadze, and the urban landmarks of Tbilisi. The Phasianus colchicus appears as a symbol of the city's mythological-urban memory.

With this exhibition, Chinchilakashvili continues his art-history research series, in which he examines how images from art history change in subjective human perception over time and space. How do we perceive historical images today, and what is the connection between the symbols of the past and contemporary visual culture? The paintings echo historical sources - not by directly reproducing them, but by transforming them: through the artist's visual and emotional perception, personal narrative, and spatial memory.

The exhibition is divided into four layers: text, painting, spatial installation, and video essay. By constructing a metal-frame installation and visually quoting the building's architectural forms, the artist seems to reduce the space to its basic structure. Paintings based on art history and imaginary pseudo-memories of the characters are placed within this simplified structural framework. As a result, architecture becomes part of the exhibition's internal logic, where the building's past, art history, and contemporary experience are woven into a single structure.

The video essay is built from 1970s and 1980s television footage from the National Archives of Georgia. This material preserves the everyday, seemingly familiar look of Tbilisi, but during editing, it loses its coherence and takes on a dreamlike, surreal rhythm. In the sound layer, Georgian music of that period is interwoven with the works of contemporary Georgian musicians (VAZHMARR and TeTe Noise), resulting in different periods merging into a single spatial and emotional field.

“The Story of a Thread Seen Through the Window” is a blend of this specific space, art history, invented memory, and contemporary image experience. The thread here is not just a direct reference to a sewing factory; it becomes a connecting metaphor between time, characters, architecture, urban memory, and artistic mediums.


Erekle Chinchilakashvili (b. 1992, Tbilisi) is a multidisciplinary artist-researcher based in Budapest. He holds a Doctorate in Artistic Research from the Hungarian University of Fine Arts, a Master's degree in Scenography, and a Bachelor's degree in Art History & Theory from the Tbilisi State Academy of Arts.

Working across painting, installation, and video, Chinchilakashvili explores the fluid boundary between reality and imagination and the fragility, flux, and transformation of human perception. His practice interrogates the construction of individual and collective memory, its role in shaping cultural identity, and its entanglement with social and cultural anthropology. He is interested in memory as something alive - restructuring itself as we change, and in how collective memory continues to live inside contemporary painting, both the wider memory we share as a species and the local memory fields of specific communities.
By appropriating and transforming inherited images and personal visual material, he constructs emotional, memory-saturated spaces that confront the viewer and hold the potential for transformative experience. Alongside painting, he works in installation, assembling paintings, sculptures, dry plants, steel, and found objects into spatial environments that extend the logic of painting into three dimensions - treating individual paintings not as self-contained images but as nodes within a larger memory-space.

Chinchilakashvili is currently a Lecturer at Budapest Metropolitan University and has previously taught at the Hungarian University of Fine Arts and the Tbilisi State Academy of Arts. His work is held in the collection of the Krupa Art Foundation, Wrocław; The Why Not Gallery, Tbilisi; and private collections across Europe and the United States.

He has exhibited widely across Europe, including the solo exhibitions The Lingering Presence, tranzit.hu, Budapest (2025); Flashback Game, Dobozi 21, Budapest (2023); In a Puddle of Rust, a Faded Memory Drips, Experimental Space Szövetség, Budapest (2023); and Shadows, Cypresses, and a Lost Sense of Immanence, 1515 Lincoln Gallery, Oklahoma City (2022); the duo exhibition Slow Sun, The Why Not Gallery, Tbilisi (2024); and group exhibitions including Nothing Goes According to the Plan, Hannah Kreile Projects, Paris (2024) and Vessels, Cabin Gallery, Berlin (2024).