Erekle Chinchilakashvili in Budapest, Painting, Installation and Memory

Erekle Chinchilakashvili builds spaces that behave like archives and then undoes the archive's promise. Paintings, steel frames, found objects and dry plants accumulate into installations that hold the texture of a filing system without ever restoring what that system claims to preserve.

What looks like documentation turns out to be a private cosmology, assembled from fragments the artist chooses to keep.

The tension sits in the gap between recording and remembering. A photograph, a Soviet-era television clip, a scrap of Georgian folklore, each carries the appearance of evidence, yet none of it settles into fact. Perception, in this practice, keeps rearranging itself, and the work holds that instability rather than resolving it.

His work also draws on questions of cultural identity and social and cultural anthropology, examining how shared memory shapes the way individuals and communities perceive the world.

A record does not return what is missing. It only proves, with more precision, that it is gone.

The Lingering Presence, 2025, shown at tranzit.hu in Budapest, made this literal. The installation follows a fictional archivist assigned to catalogue war casualties, moving through shelves of over-illuminated photographs whose subjects look back without ever being retrievable.

The piece treats the act of archiving as already a form of erasure: to document a war casualty is not to hold onto their existence but to formalize its absence, one folder at a time.

The Story of a Thread Seen from a Window, 2026, his most recent solo exhibition in Tbilisi, works the same logic through the artist's own city.

A skeletal metal-frame structure gives the paintings a sculptural spine, evoking both church altarpieces and the improvised renovation aesthetic of Tbilisi's post-industrial buildings.

Structured like a grid, it organizes memory, image and reference into something that looks scientific but behaves like fiction, a system for sorting recollection that keeps producing new recollections instead of settling into one.

Across both projects, Chinchilakashvili treats found and inherited images the same way he treats studio material.

He filters Soviet television footage, medieval frescoes and a species of pheasant recurring as an urban symbol through personal narrative rather than reproducing them, letting collective memory and individual perception collide inside the same frame.

Born in Tbilisi in 1992, Chinchilakashvili is completing a Doctorate in Artistic Research at the Hungarian University of Fine Arts. He holds a Master's in Scenography and a Bachelor's in Art History and Theory from the Tbilisi State Academy of Arts.

He teaches at Budapest Metropolitan University, having previously taught at institutions in both Budapest and Tbilisi. That double footing, Georgian and Hungarian, academic and studio-based, keeps surfacing in the work itself. Memory here is never a single, stable inheritance but something negotiated between places, disciplines and generations.

Alongside painting and installation, his practice also includes video and film, extending these investigations of memory and perception into moving images.

What his installations preserve, in the end, is the difficulty of preserving anything at all.

Erekle Chinchilakashvili on Instagram