Levan Songulashvili & Christian Awe – Black | Sea

In the exhibition black I sea, 68projects presents works by the Berlin painter Christian Awe and the Georgian painter Levan Songulashvili. The show combines powerful, life-affirming colour compositions by Awe with the black-and-white philosophical approach to painting by Songulashvili.

Two artists, two flows, two worlds—together at 68projects. The motive and emotional medium is water: its energy, its depth and intangibility, its fire, its colours. Water is the elixir of life that, like the air we breathe, is fleeting and unfathomable, yet—unlike air—leaves no more than a wet glow upon the skin. Water that is colourless and yet reflects all colours. Water that creates fertility and quenches thirst; and the fire that purifies, carries, and floods us. Water that stands still or flows to the sea, which is never the same when we dive into it.

Water is part of the myth of life and the hereafter—it erases memory and yet stores all memory as it flows through layers of rock. Water with which all colours are painted and which, as Christian Awe shows, when sculpted and formed, can produce fireworks of colour. With the appearance of water drops running over the canvas, the border between imagination and reality disappears.

The depths of the oil paintings of the young Georgian painter Levan Songulashvili evoke the underworld and the River Styx, where marsh plants and jellyfish (French méduse, German Quallen) surround the dead, translating the remnants of organic existence into their own—to embrace and devour.

The works of Berlin-born artist Christian Awe (born 1978) stand in a tradition ranging from the German Expressionists through Informel to abstraction as developed by Hans Hartung, Sam Francis, and Gerhard Richter. Awe’s works are abstract, yet on the edge of figuration. He applies colour in many layers, lets it run, writes into it, rips it off, and uncovers underlying layers. In this way, linear drawings and almost figurative elements emerge.

In his newest works, Awe combines plastic, almost photographic or print-like colour landscapes with powerful rivulets and seemingly spontaneous gestures. What appears unintentional at first glance is in fact an intentionally created composition. Awe has exhibited widely in national and international exhibitions, from Hamburg and Düsseldorf to Stockholm, Los Angeles, and Tokyo.

Awe defines himself as an ambassador for the democratization of art and is an advocate for social, artistic, and educational projects. He founded the Construction-with-Arts project, which finances the building of a school and a hospital in Burkina Faso, and he is actively involved in integrative refugee initiatives.

Levan Songulashvili, born in 1991 in Tbilisi, began painting at the age of six and received professional training in his hometown during his teenage years. At 22, he graduated from the State Art Academy with a bachelor’s degree in drawing and printing. Early in his career, he received several scholarships and awards and became the first Georgian student to graduate from the New York Academy of Art with a master’s degree in painting.

His award-winning works—combining old mastery with cutting-edge techniques—are shown in galleries, private collections, and museums worldwide, including the Brooklyn Museum. Both in Tbilisi and New York, Songulashvili was an Artist in Residence at Galerie Kornfeld / 68projects in Berlin for three months, during which four large-format oil paintings were created and exhibited as a continuation of his Styx series.

These works show a mythologist and mystic at work, whose fantastically hovering instrument—whether feather, pen, or brush—always probes into depth, into the secret where all colours fade out in these works of art. An Ophelia-esque woman’s head depicts a barely recognizable form of a female body on its face—an unobtrusive quotation from art history (Magritte) that is as present in his images as the myths of figures drawn from religion and poetry.

Awe is inspired by the big city with all its urban bustle and the vitality of its people, as well as by the elements of nature. He celebrates an insatiable scientific curiosity, constantly searching for the boundaries of the painting process. His works—built through contrasts of close-ups and zoom-outs, matte and glossy layers, and colour oppositions—emerge in an almost archaic process responding to his own energy and rhythm in the studio. The works appear tactile and continuously generate surprising visual experiences.

In contrast, in Levan Songulashvili’s work everything is revealed and made visible, including colours that dissolve into shadowy, suggestive, and changeable realms—back into a dreamlike space where knowledge and ignorance, the conscious, half-conscious, and unconscious, flow beneath the surface of the water. Songulashvili is regarded as one of the most promising contemporary artists of today.