Sopho Mamaladze, Georgian artist based in Tbilisi, blends myth, identity, and human-animal forms through layered figuration and multimedia practices.
Sopho Mamaladze: Where the Mythic Meets the Intimate
In Tbilisi, a promising artist is reshaping how we see figuration, memory, and myth.
"What lingers beyond the flesh isn’t fantasy. It’s memory - woven into canvas, clawed into vision."
Sopho Mamaladze—Georgian artist and multimedia thinker, works across painting, drawing, installation, photography and video to craft hybrid visions where humans blur into animals and the intimate folds into the archetypal.
Her emotionally-charged canvases, rich in rough texture and symbolic friction, are not simply depictions - they’re portals.
Rooted in the Georgian landscape yet reaching into universal mythologies, her works offer a visual language where identity, emotion, and the natural world coexist, overlap, and dissolve.
About SophoMamaladze work: The Stillness That Screams
A green meadow becomes a psychological stage. A blurred face, half-human, half-beast, stares out from a rough canvas like it’s remembering something you forgot.
In Sopho Mamaladze’s world, the line between creature and spirit, body and archetype, isn’t crossed, it’s dissolved.
Her figures do not simply pose; they haunt. Their gestures are small, but their weight is mythic. This is not about visual drama. It’s about presence.
Mamaladze’s practice resists one medium, opting instead for what the image demands. In her latest works—from the drawing Whisperers in the Shadows to the luminous Wild Guardians, we see a voice that is not loud, but resonant.
She blends acrylic, pastel, textile, and photography, layering surfaces until the material begins to echo. What results is a kind of silent polyphony: personal yet collective, intimate yet symbolic.
There is something ancient in her works, but not nostalgic. Instead, her paintings feel like unearthed pages from a dream you didn’t write, but lived.
The rough textures she prefers aren’t aesthetic affectations—they are chosen for friction. For memory. For making the invisible graspable. These aren’t works to admire. They’re works to recognize.
Somewhere between figuration and fracture, Mamaladze opens a space that feels less like depiction and more like translation—translating feeling into form. Animals appear often. So do people. But rarely are they separate.
In What Lingers Beyond the Flesh, the boundary between species dissolves into spirit. And in Silent Archetypes, we’re not looking at characters, but embodiments—vessels of inherited sensation.
Mamaladze’s strength lies in her resistance to easy symbolism. A horse isn’t a metaphor. A body isn’t a symbol. A guardian isn’t there to protect—but to accompany.
Her recent presentation at the Tbilisi Art Fair 2024 revealed just how urgent this vision feels today: one where myth isn’t escape but reconnection, not fantasy but healing.
Sopho Mamaladze: “Autoportrait” Video/Photo project. 2023/2024 Vienna,Austria. @jorbeee
She does not depict scenes. She reveals thresholds. Her work is a call toward porousness—the past in the present, the natural in the human, the personal as collective.
It’s no surprise she moves fluidly across media: installation, video, and photography enter her orbit not as expansions, but as necessary continuations. Painting is central—but never singular.
Sopho Mamaladze: From the Series “Vomit” Oil/Handmade paper 19/24cm - 2025 - Permission and Courtesy of the artist
Mamaladze’s artistic path mirrors her process: intuitive, altered mid-journey, driven by trust in what emerges.
"The path is broken," she says of her working process. "And I try to follow it." That brokenness, that openness, is what gives her work such fragile power.
It invites the viewer to do the same.
Key Themes
- Mythical embodiment
- Human-animal relationships
- Emotional recognition
- Dream-memory spaces
- Hybrid forms and identities
Sopho Mamaladze: Tongue, Ceramic, 10/10cm ,2024/25 - Permisson and courtesy of the artist
Notable Series / Visual Motifs
- Rough-textured figures
- Animal-human hybrids
- Green meadows and liminal landscapes
- Silent guardians
- Archetypal beings and blurry faces
Positioning in Contemporary Art
Sopho Mamaladze emerges as part of a rising Georgian and Eastern European scene reshaping figurative art.
Her focus on texture, memory, and myth situates her between contemporary symbolic figuration and post-narrative expression. In a world saturated with clarity, her images whisper—becoming sites of emotional archaeology.
Follow the Artist
Follow Sopho Mamaladze on Instagram and visit her new website to see the full range of her work—from textured dream-portraits to mythic installations.
Let the figures find you.
Follow Sopho Mamaladze on Instagram and accompany her artistic journey.
Sopho Mamaladze
More on her new Website - Sopho Mamaladze
Special thanks to Gvantsa Jishkariani for selecting this remarkable artist for the showcase.
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