Within the span of his short artistic career, Kacharava produced over five thousand drawings, journals, and painted canvases. Seldom separating them from his writing, his paintings are frequently concerned with the pictorial potential of the written word. The textual iconography he employs switches between Georgian and Latin script, becoming filled with allusions to Western European scholarship. References abound in Kachavara’s work generally, reflecting his worldly perspectives long before the 1991 independence of his native Georgia from the Soviet Union. While his visual palate is heavily influenced by pre-war German painting, particularly the legacies of Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, as well as Neo Expressionist Jean-Michel Basquiat, Kachavara’s work contains sprawling connections to art, theory and literature. From Ida Applebroog’s storyboards and Mario Sironi’s shadows to American Pop Art and the theories of Mikhail Bakunin; the poetry of Theodor Däubler; the novels of Patrick Modiano; the films of Rainer Werner Fassbinder; the lyrics of Nick Cave: each citation becomes a vehicle and protagonist in Kacharava’s intricate network, which ambivalently stakes Tbilisi as a dislocated cultural nexus. His spirited images weave stories that are at once particular and universal, and which - beneath their complex layers of metaphorical footnotes and annotations - speak of anarchy, longing, and hope.

A cult figure in Germany and throughout the Caucasus, Karlo Kacharava (b. 1964, Samtredia – d. 1994, Tbilisi) was a fixture of Georgian artistic and intellectual circles before his untimely death from a sudden brain aneurysm at the age of thirty. From 1981 to 1986, he studied art history at the Tbilisi State Academy of Arts, afterwards joining the Chubinashvili Institute of the History of Georgian Art as a researcher. Alongside and between his visual art and activities with Tbilisi’s Tenth Floor Group, he produced numerous works of poetry and critical theory. In 1990, he left the USSR for the first time, relocating briefly to Cologne. During his lifetime, Kacharava participated in up to 40 exhibitions. In 1997, he was posthumously awarded the Giorgi Chubinashvili State Prize for his contribution to Georgian art history. In 2017, a major retrospective was organised by Irena Popiashvili at the Georgian Nation- al Museum. Kacharava’s works are held in collections including the George Economou Collection, Athens; the Georgian National Museum, Tbilisi; He Art Museum, Shunde; Kolodzei Art Foundation, Highland Park; MARe/ Muzeul de Arta Recenta, Bucharest; and The Rachofsky Collection, Dallas. In December 2023, S.M.A.K Ghent mounted the first museum exhibition of Kacharava’s work outside of Georgia.