Tamara Kvesitadze Georgia, b. 1968

Tamara Kvesitadze is a Georgian sculptor and conceptual artist represented by KORNFELD Galerie Berlin. Born in 1968 in Tbilisi, Georgia, she is one of the most distinctive voices in contemporary kinetic art. At the heart of her practice is the human body: as a vessel of desire, conflict, and transformation, always in motion, always ambiguous. Her kinetic sculptures unite engineering precision with an almost archaic physical language. They move, breathe, and rotate, pausing at the boundary between the grotesque and the tender.

Kvesitadze's work is rooted in antiquity and mythology, yet equally engaged with the contradictions of the present: violence and sexuality, the individual and society, the unconscious and the controlled. Fragments, masks, and deliberately unfinished bodies are her vocabulary. Her sculptures are never complete, but always in the process of becoming.

Her institutional profile is substantial. In 2011, Kvesitadze represented Georgia with a solo exhibition at the Venice Biennale, having previously participated in the Georgian Pavilion in 2007. In 2018, she became one of the few international artists to be presented with a dedicated virtual exhibition on Google Arts & Culture, a platform reserved for content from the world's leading museums and archives. Her work is held in private and public collections across Europe, Asia, and the United States, and a commission of thirteen works is permanently installed at Glebe House in Chelsea, London. She has exhibited at institutions including the Saatchi Gallery, London, and the Art Palace of Georgia, Tbilisi, among others.

Kvesitadze's public sculptures have reached audiences far beyond the gallery context. Her most celebrated work, "Man and Woman" (later retitled "Ali and Nino"), is a nine-metre-tall kinetic sculpture installed on the seafront of Batumi, Georgia since 2010. Two fragmented steel figures slowly revolve toward each other, merge for a brief moment, and pass through one another, a meditation on proximity, longing, and the impossibility of permanent union. Versions of "Man and Woman" have since been permanently installed in Vietnam, China, France, and New Zealand, making it one of the most widely sited kinetic sculptures of its kind. In 2012, her work "Hours" was installed on Marjanishvili Street in Tbilisi, and "Rotation" on Khimshiashvili Avenue in Batumi in 2011. In 2019, her monumental sculpture "Sigh", standing 18.5 metres tall, was permanently installed in Wuxi, China.

KORNFELD Galerie Berlin has accompanied Tamara Kvesitadze at leading international art fairs for over a decade: from Art International Istanbul (2014) and Art 16 London (2016), to Volta NY (2017), Art021 Shanghai (2019 and 2021), Art Dubai (2022), Art Busan (2022 and 2023), KIAF Seoul (2022 and 2023), Asia Now Paris (2023 and 2024), Art Karlsruhe (2022, 2023 and 2025), and Art Düsseldorf (2025). This sustained presence across leading fairs in Europe, Asia, and the Middle East reflects the international reach of her practice.

At the gallery, Kvesitadze has realised several solo exhibitions, including "Red", "Any Direction", "The Passage", and most recently "Medea. Fragments of Memory", presented in the historic spaces of Palazzo Bragadin in Venice. The group exhibition "Under Shadows" at KORNFELD Galerie Berlin brought her work together with that of Shunxiang Hu, examining how two artists whose lives are shaped by political and social pressure assert creative freedom through their practice.

Tamara Kvesitadze lives and works in Tbilisi and Berlin.