It’s roughly 5,500 miles from Tbilisi, Georgia, to East Hampton, but Nutsa Gogaladze has made the trip twice during the last two years to undertake combined residencies at the Elaine de Kooning House and the Pollock-Krasner House and Study Center.
How did that unlikely connection come about? Before taking the helm of the Pollock-Krasner House in March 2024, Matthew K. Ward was the senior director of curatorial affairs at the Museum of the Southwest in Midland, Tex. “I had gotten a request from my director to do a children’s book,” Ward said. “I found Nutsa’s work online, through Instagram, and she has this very dreamy, innocent magical style. And more than style, she suggests this precious little world. So I thought Nutsa seemed the perfect illustrator to suggest that kind of world.”
That book, “Wish Goes Home,” a story about a family of prairie dogs being relocated with text by Ward and illustrations by Gogaladze, was published in 2023, and Gogaladze’s illustrations were featured in an exhibition at the museum the following year. During her second residency, which will run through October, she and Ward are working on a book about Springs and the Pollock-Krasner House.
The specific subject? “Right now I’m making some paintings, and I will use as references Lee Krasner’s work, Jackson Pollock’s work, and Elaine de Kooning’s work,” said Gogaladze. “After I finish these paintings, Matt will send me the story and I will make illustrations of Jackson’s crow, whose name was Caw-Caw,” the subject of the book. The paintings and illustrations are unrelated.
Gogaladze showed a visitor a catalog Ward gave her from “Krasner and Pollock: Past Continuous,” currently on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Her Pollock painting was inspired in part by his “Number 1,” from 1949, while her Krasner painting took as a reference point that artist’s “Palingenesis,” from 1971. For her Elaine de Kooning painting, which she hasn’t yet begun, she plans to draw from that artist’s “Bacchus” series. While the new works refer to their inspirations without in any way copying them, she did point to a few areas in her Pollock painting where she attempted drips “my way.”
A self-taught artist, illustrator, and curator, Gogaladze was born in Tbilisi in 1998 and still lives and works there. While she painted as a child, that gave way to music. “My mother was a musician, and I was taking classical piano lessons.” She took it seriously for a while, but gave it up to pursue her education.
She received a degree in finance and business administration from Georgian International University in 2020. “When you are 17 years old, you have no idea what you eventually want,” she said about that course of study. “When I finished it, I wanted to continue my artistic path, so I focused on painting.”
That path also took her to the Center of Contemporary Art in Tbilisi where she completed a course in creative mediation, whose focus was society-based projects. “I chose a project for self-taught artists, because in Georgia, art is not so well supported. Older self-taught artists are especially under-appreciated, and I felt they needed to engage more in society.”
From among many talented artists, she chose seven for an exhibition at the Center for Contemporary Art. That was the genesis for the March Gallery, an online gallery she established to showcase the work of self-taught artists. While she hasn’t organized an actual exhibition yet, she has made studio visits and hopes to collaborate with galleries for a “moving gallery” in other physical spaces.
She said the art community in Tbilisi is small, but some artists, including herself, have shown worldwide. “We don’t have many galleries, so it’s good we have the internet so others can discover the interesting artists we have. Tbilisi is an ancient city with a rich history, and I think that influences artists.”
Showing a visitor some pastel works from 2025, she explained that because Tbilisi has many older buildings it also has many frescoes. “I was trying to get that kind of effect in my work on the paper’s texture,” she said.
Gogaladze has had solo shows at the Museum of the Southwest and Project Gallery, a New York-based contemporary online art platform. Her solo show at Project, “I Walked a Lot to Arrive in This Garden,” took place in 2023 and included 15 artworks.
Her statement for the Project show expressed her approach to art. “My soft pastel works represent life impressions gained from personal experiences, telling stories of unforgettable beautiful sights. Recent pieces capture the dialogue between my inner child and adult self, expressed through different symbols such as the playfulness of cats, lights, still lives, and fallen petals. . . . I never know what I’m going to draw next, so this spontaneous process allows me to create unexpected compositions that wouldn’t be possible with a planned approach.”
She has also participated in group shows at the Bridewell Studios and Gallery in Liverpool, England, the Bernheim Gallery in Zurich, Identica in Tbilisi, and mepaintsme, a virtual art platform founded by an artist and curator in New York who uses mepaintsme as a pseudonym.
Gogaladze created her first Instagram page in 2022 and now has three, one focused on her own work, one on her work and life, and one on artists who have influenced her. Especially important to her are Odilon Redon, the 19th-century French symbolist, and Edouard Vuillard, the French painter “who conjured the muffled quiet and richly patterned textures of private life inside the city’s bourgeois homes and gardens,” according to the Museum of Modern Art. Redon’s exploration of dreams and Vuillard’s decorative patterning find expression in her work.
As for her time in Springs, Gogaladze said, “I have more time for self-reflection. Here I can feel more relaxed and closer to nature. It’s very important for any artist, I think, because most of my favorite artists work in colorful places. In the future I hope to have a studio with good light and access to a garden or a yard. I think it will reflect in my work so I can learn more about myself and grow as an artist and also be more experimental.”
