Kobuladze's archive is a historical fragment of his studio: the display has the filigree precision of documentary narrative, yet we meet entropic poetry-an ark built from sensations of gain and loss. Through these fragments we glimpse biography, mastery and the slow erosion of Soviet legacy."
- Konstantine Bolkvadze, art historian, 2025

Few spaces reveal the inner workings of Georgian modernism as vividly as Sergo Kobuladze’s studio-archive, now reconstructed at Art Foundation Anagi. A titan of 20th-century Tbilisi painting, scenography and printmaking, Kobuladze (1909 – 1978) comes into focus here not through a retrospective hang but through the material afterlife of his workplace: plaster casts of Renaissance reliefs, carved theatre maquettes and stacks of etchings that survived decades of Soviet neglect. The result is less a didactic archive than what Bolkvadze calls “entropic poetry—an ark of gain and loss.”

 

Within this mise-en-scène the artist’s celebrated polymathic phenomenon becomes tangible. Beyond oil sketches for King Lear backdrops lie glyptic miniatures, photographic enlargers and a hand-built projector—tools that attest to a practice stretching from avant-garde set design to print theory and experimental optics. A monumental oak shelf, designed and engineered by Kobuladze himself, functions like an iconostasis: everyday implements, Fra Angelico postcards, black-glazed Tbilisi ceramics and alchemical minerals coexist in a three-tier grid that echoes Renaissance façades and the golden ratio. This hybrid of Georgian craft and Western classicism—“secular icons” framed by Italianate proportion—condenses the very principle that underpins his oeuvre.

 

Re-situating these fragments in Tbilisi does more than canonise a single master; it invites viewers to read Kobuladze as a hinge figure between Soviet modernity and a deeper Eurasian humanism. Like James Ensor’s house-museum in Ostend, the exhibition collapses life and art into a single “body,” offering an immersive anatomy of creative process. In foregrounding archive over chronology, Sergo Kobuladze: Studio Reconstruction affirms Art Foundation Anagi’s mission to rescue Georgian cultural memory and present it as a living catalyst for fresh artistic inquiry.