The Why Not Gallery Presents The Story of a Thread Seen Through the Window in Tbilisi

The Why Not Gallery presents The Story of a Thread Seen Through the Window, Erekle Chinchilakashvili's first solo exhibition at the gallery, on view from July 20 to July 30, 2026.

A window frames what passes through it, not what stays. What gets held instead is thinner, a color, a gesture, the outline of a hand reaching for something already gone.

At a former sewing factory in Tbilisi, that residue is being stretched across steel and paint until it holds its shape a little longer.

Memory rarely arrives as a single image. It comes as a wall shot through with recurring shapes, a symbol repeating without asking permission, a domestic detail turning up decades later in another country.

The exhibition treats this repetition as material, not metaphor.

The grid does not organize memory so much as admit that memory was never orderly to begin with.

The Why Not Gallery's new venue sits inside Fabrika Tbilisi, a former garment complex that once housed the Nino sewing factory, and the building's history is not incidental. 

Chinchilakashvili draws his research directly from the site, its 1970s and 80s production floors, the residential fabric of Ninoshvili Street around it, the wider grain of a city he now views mostly from Budapest. The half-converted industrial shell gives the work somewhere to land that is not a neutral white cube but a structure already carrying its own memory.

A floor-to-ceiling steel frame meets visitors first. Paintings hang inside its bays like specimens pinned for study, some doubled back to back, others held at an angle that forces the body to move around them.

The structure reads at once as church scaffolding, unfinished renovation and laboratory grid, and Chinchilakashvili lets all three readings stand. It turns painting into something suspended rather than settled, not a wall of images, but an apparatus built for sorting them.

A wall-mounted screen plays footage assembled from Georgian television of the same decades and from Otar Ioseliani's short film Sapovnela, sourced from the National Archives of Georgia.

It is not signaled visually so much as heard, its soundtrack braiding period recordings with new compositions by VAZHMARR and TeTe Noise until the two eras blur together. The image on the panel, saturated red and barely legible, sets the room's temperature more than its content.

One canvas set inside its own aluminum housing carries a single ochre face, rendered as skin folding into itself rather than a portrait resolving into likeness.

It sits close enough to touch and far enough from clarity that it keeps asking to be looked at twice, a small, stubborn instance of the show's larger claim, an image only becomes memory once it has been handled enough times to lose its edges.

The show arrives at a moment when a generation of artists working between two countries keeps returning to the same problem, how to hold a place accurately once distance has already changed it. 

Chinchilakashvili avoids nostalgia's usual softness. His frescoes, Portrait School references and inherited visual material become evidence for interrogation rather than material to preserve, filtered through a structure that keeps its own mechanics visible instead of hiding them.

By the time the soundtrack loops back to its opening measure, the steel grid has stopped feeling like display furniture. It reads instead as the exhibition's real subject, a frame built specifically because nothing inside it was ever going to sit still.

The paintings do not resolve the pull between record and invention. They keep it in view, one bay at a time.

Instagram The Why Not Gallery
Erekle Chinchilakashvili on Instagram