Born in 1988, Salome Rigvava was raised up in Abkhazia Georgia before settling in New York. She holds a B.A. and M.A. in painting and is currently in the MFA program at New York Academy of Art. Rigvava’s work has been a contemporary retelling of the fairytales imbued with hidden emotions, subconsciousness and taboo desires. By juxtaposing her fictional self-portraiture with the fairytale figures including the most beloved Pinocchio, Rigvava has found a way to reunite with her own smothered feelings that have been silenced for years.

 

Rigvava has grown up in a Georgian social environment that dispelled expression of personal feelings as abnormality. And in the vacuum of sincere expression, lies and self-deception become rampant. Working in a such a mental context, Rigvava has always been aware of the impossibility of completely hiding from the taboo feelings. And it always remains clear to her that these feelings keep exerting a tremendous influence on the visible domain.

 

Conceived in this social environment, Rigvava’s Pinocchio series which features the classical fairytale figure and her fictional self-portraiture is an exploration of one’s relationship with the self on different layers. “It is enough to begin a sincere relationship with ourselves to realize how much of our life has been a deception. What we have long covered with a thick blanket is as real, as natural, and as much our side as what we see with our eyes, with our touch, and with what no one is afraid to cover up.”

 

Rigvava has employed a duality of warm and cold color tones to express the coexistence of true and false feelings in her painting. The perspective of her series is frequently intriguing and voyeuristic, and this design has allowed her to invite viewers to join her intimate self-exploration while maintaining a private atmosphere that’s indispensable for excavating taboo desires. Pinocchio has been an apt allegorical reference here, and his existence has instilled a creative earnestness onto the canvass.

 

Previous to HongKong Art Central, Rigvava’s work has been collected by galleries in Germany, Japan, United States, Sweden, UK, Russia and her homeland Georgia. She was also an artist in residence in New Jersey in 2016.