Georgian artist Tamara K.E. exemplifies an approach that enfolds the traditional medium of painting in a contemporary point of view. Her extraordinarily high standard of painterly quality is exercised on themes that harbor a subliminal critique of entrenched societal structures. She extracts individual images and motifs from the daily flood of media imagery and preserves them through her craft, thus placing them in a new context that questions both our perception and the way we come to terms with images and their content. In her paintings, Tamara K. E. enlists advertising pictures, stills from Hollywood movies or MTV shows, and photos of celebrities. Following in the footsteps of Andy Warhol, she exaggerates mass media clichés to the point that they lose their aura of timeless glamour and appear instead as its opposite – as the iconography of the present.

Texts by Keti Chukhrov, Gia Edzgveradze, Boris Groys, Renate Wiehager