Thea Djordjadze (Georgian: თეა ჯორჯაძე; born 1971 in Tbilisi, Georgia) is a contemporary artist based in Berlin, Germany. She is best known for sculpture and installation art, but also works in a variety of other media (drawing, painting, printing, performance, video, music).
Thea Djorjadze works with materials like plaster, wood, ceramic, glass, along with fabrics, sponge, soap, cardboard or papier-mâché – more openly suggestive of a sphere of feminine domesticity. They are assembled in what looks like an almost intuitive process, where unformed, premature pieces collide with / or rest on precise architectural or domestic structures: hybrid compositions with references to the modernist language.
In her works and their titles, she refers to popular culture, film (e.g. Augen ohne Gesicht, 2000), architecture (e.g. le Corbusier in Mondi Possibli 2006), (popular) science and hermetism (e.g. edition Die Mathematik, 2001, installation o.T. (Dipol), 2003, or performances WahrSagen, 2001, and Kaffeesatzlesen, 2008), literature (e.g. Je n'ai besoin de personne pour me souvenir Lilya Brik and Vladimir Mayakovsky or in Archäologie, Politik, Politik, Archäologie, Archäologie, Politik, Politik, Archäologie Andrè Malraux and Joseph Brodsky), as well as Georgian arts and crafts and culture (e.g. in incorporating carpets in her work or in quoting Niko Pirosmani in 2001).
The viewer is often invited into an ongoing research, in which the transformation and assemblage of materials is sedimented in the objects. Der Knacks (i.e. the crack) (2007), a plaster sculpture broken and then reassembled in an in-stable formation is emblematic of the artist’s method of production. The title of the work refers to Francis Scott Fitzgerald’s The Crack Up, in which break or failure is indicated as the center part of the creative process.
Thea Djordjadze is represented by Sprüth Magers (http://spruethmagers.com/artists/thea_djordjadze)