Rusudan Khizanishvili Georgia, b. 1979

Rusudan Khizanishvili was born in 1979 in Tbilisi, Georgia. She completed two BFAs in Painting, first at J. Nikoladze Art School (1994–1998), then at the Tbilisi State Academy of Art (1998–2003), before earning an MA in Film Studies from the Tbilisi State Academy of Art in 2004. This layered formation, spanning painting and moving image within the Georgian academic tradition, established the conceptual and visual foundations of a practice that has grown steadily in international reach and critical recognition over the past two decades.

Khizanishvili's paintings are figurative in structure but mythological in register. Her canvases are populated by women, goddesses, and hybrid creatures drawn from Georgian folklore, art historical sources, and the artist's own symbolic vocabulary. The recurring motifs of armor, transformation, and the female body in states of power or vulnerability speak to broader questions of identity, resistance, and representation. Her work has been described as balancing "Georgian culture, which is so rich in traditions, and the conceptually driven contemporary discourse on representation and its functions." The result is a body of painting that is simultaneously rooted in place and internationally legible, dense with surface, color, and meaning.

Khizanishvili's works are held in public and private collections including the Mark Rothko Art Center, Latvia; the Georgian National Museum of History, Tbilisi; the Oni Local Museum, Georgia; the Collezione Taurisano, Naples; the Breus Foundation, Moscow; and the collection of Sam Keller, Basel. In 2016 she received the Main Prize at the Związek Polskich Artystów Plastyków, Gliwice Art Community, Poland. Her publications include a monograph with texts by Christoph Tannert and Suzan Kizilirmak (2022), and King Is Female: Three Artists from Georgia (Wienand Verlag, 2018), with a foreword by Alfred Kornfeld, launched at the Frankfurt Book Fair. She has undertaken residencies at the Mark Rothko Art Center in Daugavpils, the CCA Andratx in Mallorca, the Bedstuy Art Residency in Brooklyn, and the Istanbul Artist Residency, among others.

Her solo exhibition history spans three continents. Key presentations include Rooms & Beings at 68projects by KORNFELD, Berlin (2020); Of Goddesses and Women in Tbilisi (2021); Beauty and the Beast at KORNFELD Galerie Berlin (2022); a solo exhibition in Naples (2022); a solo exhibition in Seoul (2023); a solo exhibition in Paris (2023); a solo exhibition in Busan (2025); and Sacrificial Rites, a duo exhibition with Chucho Reyes in Mexico City (2026). Group exhibitions have brought her work to the 56th Venice Biennale Georgian National Pavilion (2015), as well as presentations in New York and Palma de Mallorca, among others.

Rusudan Khizanishvili is represented by KORNFELD Galerie Berlin. The gallery has presented her work consistently at major international art fairs including KIAF Seoul, Art Busan, Expo Chicago, Untitled Art Fair Miami, and Art021 Shanghai, building her visibility across the global art market. In 2022 the gallery hosted her solo exhibition Beauty and the Beast in Berlin, and in 2025 presented her in the group exhibition Trust Issues at KORNFELD Galerie Berlin. Khizanishvili's practice continues to expand its mythological and feminist inquiry, with each new body of work deepening its engagement with the forces, cultural, historical, and bodily, that shape the lives of women.