David Meskhi Georgia, b. 1979

David Meskhi was born in 1979 in Tbilisi, Georgia, and lives and works between Tbilisi and Berlin. He first pursued an academic path in the natural sciences, completing a master's degree in hydro-ecology before redirecting his focus entirely toward art. He subsequently studied photography at the Shota Rustaveli Theatre and Film University in Tbilisi, where he received a degree in photojournalism. Early in his career he worked as a photographer for leading Georgian cultural magazines, and his works entered the collection of the Georgian House of Photography, marking the beginning of a sustained institutional engagement with his practice.

Meskhi's artistic language is built around the body in motion and the charged space between physical effort and apparent effortlessness. His photographs show mostly young male figures, athletes and adolescents, caught mid-air or in states of extreme extension, set against backgrounds of dense, luminous colour that resist easy spatial reading. The viewer cannot always determine whether a figure is falling, rising, or suspended. This deliberate ambiguity is central to Meskhi's inquiry: his work explores fragility and identity, the longing to recover the lightness of youth, and the fluid boundaries between masculine and feminine energies. Aesthetic references to queer fashion photography and the saturated palette of Technicolor cinema trace back to his childhood in Soviet Georgia, where access to such imagery was rare and therefore charged with particular intensity. His father, coach of the national gymnastics team, brought back brochures and magazines from international tournaments that opened visual worlds otherwise inaccessible. These formative encounters with idealised athletic bodies and Western visual culture remain a persistent undercurrent in the work. In 2015, Meskhi co-directed the documentary "When the Earth Seems to Be Light" together with Salome Machaidze and Tamuna Karumidze, a film that shares the thematic concerns of his photographic practice.

Meskhi's photographs are held in institutional collections including the Georgian House of Photography, Tbilisi. His work has been exhibited at the Museum für Angewandte Kunst, Frankfurt; the Braunsfelder Familiensammlung, Cologne; the Calvert 22 Foundation, London; the Georgian National Museum, Tbilisi; the Robert Capa Contemporary Photography Center, Budapest; the Kunstverein Freiburg; and the Musée d'art moderne et contemporain de Saint-Étienne Métropole (MAMC+), France, where a solo exhibition opened in 2024.

Meskhi's exhibition history spans Europe and beyond. His photographs were presented at Paris Photo in 2019. Group exhibitions have included "Post-Soviet Visions: Image and Identity in the New Eastern Europe" at the Calvert 22 Foundation, London (2018), and "Elementary Particles: Epigraphs from Georgian Photography" at Gallery Artbeat, Tbilisi (2018). His work has been shown at the Biennale de la Photographie de Mulhouse and at IRIS Arles, where the exhibition was presented courtesy of KORNFELD Galerie Berlin.

KORNFELD Galerie Berlin has been central to the international positioning of David Meskhi's practice. The gallery presented his solo exhibition "Allow" from 4 March to 19 April 2023, a show of approximately 24 photographs spanning several bodies of work, presented as part of EMOP Berlin, the European Month of Photography. A duo exhibition with Hubert Scheibl was also presented at the gallery during Berlin Art Week. Meskhi's work has featured in the gallery's anniversary group exhibition "Looking Back Ahead," alongside artists including Elvira Bach, Natela Iankoshvili, and Christopher Lehmpfuhl, affirming his place within the gallery's programme of international contemporary art.

David Meskhi continues to develop a body of work that resists easy categorisation, moving between the documentary and the poetic, the autobiographical and the universal, with a visual intelligence that grows more assured with each new series.