This past May marked the fifth edition of Tbilisi Art Fair — still the only contemporary art fair Georgia has to its name, but one that’s steadily carving out a more unusual role as a meeting ground for Europe, the Caucasus, and Central Asia. Thirty-five galleries from fifteen countries filled the vast halls of Expo Georgia, bringing together artists from Georgia, Armenia, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, and further afield.
The fair was launched in 2018 by French curator Erik Schlosser and Georgian businessman Kaha Gvelesiani, working alongside a team of local curators. From the outset, the goal wasn’t scale so much as positioning — building a genuinely distinctive space where Western art could sit in dialogue with work from the Caucasus and Central Asia, rather than simply be shown alongside it. Nearly a decade in, that’s still the fair’s clearest identity: a gathering point for galleries, artists, and collectors from roughly fifteen countries who don’t often share the same room.
A tale of two visual languages
This year’s edition felt like a snapshot of Georgia’s growing confidence within a wider post-Soviet, Eurasian cultural sphere. Established European galleries shared the floor with newcomers from Central Asia — Bonum Factum Gallery and Dump Gallery among them — and the difference in visual vocabulary was hard to miss. Much of the Georgian and European work stayed within restrained palettes and conceptual reserve, while several Central Asian artists worked in ornament, symbolism, and saturated colour. Uzbek artist Sanjar Djabbarov put it simply: his generation is used to burying meaning inside a work rather than stating it outright, and fairs like this one give audiences a chance to sit with something genuinely unfamiliar.
Reckoning with Georgia’s own history
The strongest booths tended to be the ones digging into Georgia’s own art history rather than looking outward. Window Project Gallery built a presentation around Gia Edzgveradze (b. 1953), Koka Ramishvili (b. c. 1956), and Vakhtang Kokiashvili (1930–2010), tracing a line from the late Soviet period through the turbulence that followed independence — with particular attention to the 1980s and ’90s, the decades that effectively invented Georgia’s contemporary art scene.
Younger galleries treated that same legacy with more irony and fragmentation. At Vere Gallery, references to Niko Pirosmani (1862–1918) were filtered through the visual grammar of European postmodernism, folding Georgian naïve painting into something stranger. Novo Gallery went broader, showing painting, sculpture, and miniature ceramics by Tutu Kiladze (b. 1981), while the Graphic Contemporary Center made its case purely on the consistency and craft of its graphic work.
A lion, a pun, and a few standout names
Among the European contingent, Romania’s Sandwich Gallery made one of the fair’s strongest impressions with a near-solo presentation of Leo Toteanu (b. 1969), anchored by a monumental graffiti lion that quickly became the fair’s unofficial mascot — a wink at both the artist’s surname and Romania’s currency, the leu.
The liveliest corner of the fair remained The Hive, a section reserved for independent emerging artists with prices kept deliberately accessible to pull in first-time collectors. Here, the usual formality of a commercial fair mostly fell away — artists stood next to their own work, talked directly with visitors, and experimentation clearly outranked market strategy.
A handful of names stood out. Georgian artist Teo Baramidze (b. 1986) showed a cyberpunk-inflected metal installation steeped in speculative fiction and fractured mythology. Marseille-based Philippe Chea Oum (b. 1998) brought graphic works that balanced grotesque humor with the visual punch of high-end comics, while Brazilian-French painter Mariam Angeli Padilha (b. 1999) exhibited vivid landscapes tinged with a quiet magical realism.
Small scale, real significance
By international standards, TAF is still a modest fair — and that’s arguably part of what makes it work. In a region defined by political tension, shifting identities, and overlapping cultural pulls, it’s become something more than a marketplace. Increasingly, it functions as one of the few spaces where these different artistic worlds actually occupy the same room — which may matter more, in the end, than the size of the fair itself.