Marta Machabeli

Marta Machabeli is a Tbilisi-born artist who has studied painting in the republic of Georgia at "Georgian National Academy Of Fine Arts". She arrived in USA in 2001 and, that is where her style has taken its true shape.

Marta Machabeli’s diverse range of paintings and photography—although with affinities to artists such as Odlion Redon, among many others—is, first of all inspired by her unique vision, which, in my experience in watching it unfold over the past ten years, manifests in every aspect of her work, from the lines that draw the viewers’ gaze through a labyrinth of colors and spaces; to the eyes that appear, again and again, in her portraits, looking straightforward without so much calling upon the viewer to return their gaze, than inviting the viewer to enter into the mode of direct, penetrating wakefulness that they reflect. A lover of Rumi and Goethe’s Mephistopheles, she paints in ways that mercurially move between the dual aspects of mysticism, enlightenment and diabolical questioning—and beyond.

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- Kristina Mendicino