Abstracted face in Blue

by Gela Mikava · T'bilisi, GE

In this painting, I explore the slow erasure of identity under the weight of inherited silence. The face, barely visible and submerged in sweeping layers of blue and burning flesh tones, becomes a ghost of the self — a figure who is neither fully present nor completely gone. It is a portrait of someone born into a story they didn’t choose, fading between the lines of memory and oblivion. The striped textile at the bottom is not decorative. It is a fragment of post-socialist material culture, a worn relic of domestic life — rigid, masculine, institutional. It contrasts violently with the abstracted dissolution above, forming a visual border between control and collapse. This work is part of an ongoing investigation into post-socialist radiation — the silent, residual trauma that lingers in bodies, objects, and gestures. It asks: Who are we, when the past no longer speaks but still dictates form?