A conceptual abstractionist from St-Petersburg, Russia.

Was born in 1958 in Kutaisi, Georgia. In his youth trained to be a musician and painter, finally preferred to give up academic studying and to address to a method of free knowledge. This path brought the young artist to Petersburg, to the well-known art center "Pushkinskaia 10", where the artist works to this day. Long time worked in USA and Europe, but his destiny has appeared to be connected with Petersburg.

The career of Roland has begun with successful experiences in area of figurative painting, but as a result he devoted himself to abstract expressionism and conceptualism.
Since 1975 he is the participant of numerous exhibitions in Russia and abroad. Paintings of the artist are exhibited and stored in the largest museums of the world that signifies doubtless recognition.
In 2000 Roland writes his own manifesto in which he formulates the main principles of creativity.

Aside from paintings, he is well known for his performance, installations, sound art and video-art.

"I am interested in my own esoteric state, in looking at myself and realizing myself in unusual environments, in the space of new feelings and actions." (R. Shalamberidze, Manifesto).

The inner world of Roland Shalamberidze – his "feelings" and, subsequent or simultaneous to these feelings, "actions" – by his own admission, is the genesis and catalyst of his creative output. The artist is preoccupied not with depicting reality or even expressing it, but with generating an entirely new, autonomous, parallel universe. Shalamberidze skillfully weaves "his" reality from the visceral, emotional and instinctual fibres of his artistic personality, the id of his psyche in the Freudian sense. Furthermore, the fundamental principle is one of eliminating all traces of traditional symbol systems. In this sense, Shalamberidze’s language of communication is pure and universal. No preconceived ideas are allowed in the process of creation and, by extension, in the works of art themselves. The meaning of a painting, if indeed such exists, emerges during the act of painting and can only be truly fathomed on the level of cognition that was assumed and implied by the creative process. Robert Stark, an American artist, summed up this idea: "I want the painting to meet the viewer somewhere in the middle, where the viewer brings his own experiences to bear in understanding and feeling what he is seeing. I want my paintings to achieve the complexity and density of poetry or of a symphony, to build suggestive layers, implicit felt meaning, not merely to be entertaining bits of color to seduce the eye."

In generic terms, Shalamberidze’s oeuvre is a fusion of a number of stylistic approaches and modes of expression. His painting most readily falls in the Abstract Expressionist category, however this pigeonholing does not do it justice. Shalamberidze rejects figurative representation by embodying an art tradition that goes back via Cubism, from Cezanne to Monet, in which painting became ever "purer" and more concentrated in what was essential to it, namely the making of marks on a flat surface.

The amalgamation of various artistic principles and styles that become evident on closer analysis in Shalamberidze’s work is not incidental. In fact, it is firmly based in the artist’s rich cultural heritage. Shalamberidze was born in Georgia in the Soviet Union where he received professional artistic and musical training. Before settling down in St. Petersburg in 2003, the pursuit of his artistic career took Shalamberidze first to Europe, most notably Germany, then onto USA, New York – probably the two most important art-centers in terms of contemporary art and Abstract Expressionism in particular. Such a rich and cosmopolitan background, an unusual phenomenon amongst Russian artists still living and working in Russia, enabled Shalamberidze to inform, authenticate and refine his artistic outlooks in the atmosphere of the best western artistic traditions.

Shalamberidze’s style has its roots in Abstract Expressionism’s historical synthesis of emotional intensity and self-denial of the German Expressionists with the anti-figurative ideology and aesthetic of the European abstract schools such as Futurism, the Bauhaus and Synthetic Cubism. On a methodological level, incorporation of elements from and influence of Dadaism, Fluxus, Arte Povera and Art Brut amongst others is apparent in his work. The various modes of expression in Shalamberidze’s arsenal, namely painting, sculpture, music, performance and poetry most coherently echoes the "intermedia" approach, a term coined by the artist Dick Higgins, which characterized the Fluxus movement. In order to begin to understand Shalamberidze’s art, one has to be aware of the theoretical and ideological foundations of Abstract Expressionism in particular, and the artist’s placement within a complex matrix of aesthetic, ideological and spiritual imperatives that he constructs for himself.

Historically, the marriage of German theory to American practice gave birth to Abstract Expressionism and its most famous protagonists such as Mark Tobey, Mark Rothko, Willem de Kooning, Clyfford Still, Barnet Newmann, Jackson Pollock, Lee Krasner, Franz Kline amongst others. Hans Hofmann, a German painter and one of the first and most significant proponents and theoreticians of Abstract Expressionism, stressed the transposition of reality into the purely spiritual. Referring back to Cezanne, he taught that once grasping the laws of nature and the characteristics of the medium, the artist should take account of his own inner life. Shalamberidze echoes this concern in his mission statement: "describing the inner world through one or another means of self-expression in art and bringing them to the point of absurdity is my style and principle." In this sense Shalamberidze’s artistic output can be viewed as a dynamic meditation, a performance, mostly spontaneous and instinctive, painstakingly executed. This approach echoes the American poet-critic Harold Rosenberg’s statement in the famous Art News article of 1952 concerning Abstract Expressionism that "the canvas was not a picture, but an event". Shalamberidze sums up this technique in his manifesto where he declares that "constancy is the death of the artist". He elaborates further by proclaiming – "amid that which I want to achieve, and that which I do not, lies that which I strive for". This dialectic is a major theme in the work of Shalamberidze.

Analogous to Dadaism that emerged in the wake of the First World War, Abstract Expressionism thirty years later was "a phenomenon bursting forth in the midst of the postwar economic and moral crisis, a saviour, a monster, which would lay waste to everything in its path" . Similarly, Shalamberidze’s aesthetic is a retort not only to specific artistic and cultural trends in Russian society over the last twenty years leading up to the present day, but also a rejection of the more global principles of Western capitalistic world order. In his art the artist conveys a strong sense of anti-commercialism and an anti-art sensibility, disparaging the conventional market-driven art world in favor of an artist-centered creative practice. In this sense Shalamberidze’s work is politicized in that it seeks to comment on the moral and existentialist crisis that the individual faces in the twenty first century.

Alan Dzodziev, art critic

The state Russian museum, St.-Petersburg, Russia
The central showroom "Arena"(Manezh), St.-Petersburg, Russia
The Museum of Modern Art, Oklahoma, USA
T&N Collection, Moscow, Russia
Academy of Modern cinematography, Paris, France
Private collections in Russia and abroad

Roland Shalamberidze