Katrine Levin Galleries

Urban Allusions, Mamuka Dideba

On view from the 2nd - 14th September 2024 | Private View: 3 September | Katrine Levin Galleries at Marie Jose Gallery

"My chief goal is to transform the mundane and the realistic into something special and elevated.” (Mamuka Dideba)

Travel with Prometheus through the magical worlds of Georgia’s Brueghel, Mamuka Dideba.

Inspired in part by Italo Calvino’s “Invisible Cities”, Dideba created Urban Allusions - comprised of over 25 new works - as a metaphorical journey with Prometheus as our guide, lighting the way.

As with Calvino’s magical surrealism, Dideba's artworks are fragments of ourselves reflected back at us, perceived through our own individual lens of past memories and future aspirations.

His abstract paintings take you to magical cities built of an ingenious interplay of light and colour, imperceptibly changing tones, and evocative shapes. Inspired by the Old Masters, his figurative paintings present the cities’ quirky inhabitants who seem to exist outside of time, their exaggerated forms suggestive of their character and profession.

Born in 1968 in Tbilisi, Georgia, where he still lives and works, Dideba paints in the Renaissance imprimatura technique that requires enormous skill and patience. Widely exhibited and collected, he is affectionately dubbed Georgia’s Brueghel because of his deviation from realistic proportions and interest in human behaviour.