In the Studio With Tamo Jugeli, the Artist Whose Paintings Are “Pure Action”

Nine years ago, the Georgian artist Tamo Jugeli—whose latest body of work will be on display at Polina Berlin and Karma galleries in Manhattan starting March 18—had never set foot inside a museum. “At 22, when I first met contemporary painters in Georgia, I couldn’t understand it. I had that basic reaction: What is this? Three lines, four lines, I could have done that,” she tells me over jumbo mugs of Earl Grey tea on a frigid winter morning in her studio in East Williamsburg, Brooklyn. It has high ceilings and exposed beams, distressed red brick, a vintage Chinese Art Deco rug, and a plush, mustard corduroy sofa, on which we are seated. Large-scale oil paintings in various stages of completion line the walls.

Jugeli, who is now 31 and has lived in New York since moving from Tbilisi in 2022, was selected by David Salle for the 2023 group exhibition Beautiful, Vivid, Self-Contained, which he curated at the Hill Art Foundation. Her tableau of a giant rose and gun silhouette hung next to works by Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, and Willem de Kooning. At the time, Salle (who also collects her paintings) wrote that he wanted to see how “things made decades or centuries apart that may look dissimilar on the surface” come to have a “communality of tone, and of feeling,” placing Jugeli on a continuum with the 20th-century masters who defined modernism. That December, a sold-out booth with Polina Berlin followed at NADA, the edgier fair during Art Basel Miami. Last winter, Jugeli had a critically acclaimed show at Karma in Los Angeles, and another that summer with Gladstone in Brussels. The more recent canvases for Karma and Polina Berlin bring new force to her signature, unpredictable style. Raw and bold, with a mature, ferocious energy, they explode in pools of saturated color and strata of enigmatic shapes and gestures.

Achieving this level of skill has not been easy. “My personal, subjective enlightenment was an extremely painful process—but it was just what I needed,” Jugeli says, describing a twisty emotional journey after college, where she studied journalism. Post graduation, she edited a Georgian version of America’s Got Talent at a broadcasting company in Tbilisi. “It was a very dark time for me,” she explains. “I couldn’t understand what else to do. I was worried about my life.”

And then, everything shifted. “I was in bed crying. I said to myself, I can’t live like this.” She recalled having vaguely heard about art therapy somewhere. “The next day—it sounds so weird, as if I’m making this up—but it was really the next day, I went to my local art shop and I bought a sketchbook and markers. I was locked up in my room, reading a lot, watching art house movies,” Jugeli says. “It wasn’t fun at all. I was transforming into a new mind-set.” On reflection, that mind-set led to a rapid ascension through the art world—mentorship from Georgian artists; her leap from sketchpad to canvas; a debut show with the contemporary Tbilisi gallery Bukia Vahkania (formally Gallery Artbeat); and representation by Polina Berlin. “Polina told me she was starting a gallery and asked if I wanted to have a solo show, and then she sold everything I had made,” recalls Jugeli. “She gave me financial stability to move to New York. She gave me my first studio and apartment.” Four years later, the city’s mythos has met her expectations. “I’m really at home here,” she says. “I never get bored or lonely. It’s so tough and it’s so expensive, but somehow, I’m at peace.”

Unlike many abstract artists, who typically start at the center of a composition, establishing a focal point and then building outward, Jugeli begins at the edge of the canvas with an initial mark or stroke and then radiates inward. Rotating the works on the floor as she goes, her process is completely instinctive: no sketches, studies, stencils, or templates.

Her current work echoes that of Charline von Heyl and Joe Bradley, but with a more guttural strain: burnt umber, butter-yellow, dusty rose, inky black, blood-red drips, swaths, and washes pack a visceral punch. “There are no themes and there’s no research,” says Jugeli, citing Joan Mitchell and Philip Guston as artists who blow her away. “My paintings are pure action. When I come into the studio, I have absolutely no idea what I will do. That’s my high. They are experiments every day.”

The shows at Polina Berlin and Karma are meant to be seen in tandem; they comprise seventeen large format paintings created over the past year. “I would go to Polina first, then Karma, since that’s the order in which I painted,” says Jugeli. They share an exhibition title— From 5 to 7— referencing the 1962 French New Wave film Cleo From 5 to 7, which tracks a young pop singer through Paris for two hours, as she awaits the results of a biopsy for stomach cancer. Time closes in on Cleo and the viewer. “I love slow movies. They hypnotize me,” says Jugeli, clarifying that the paintings are not directly inspired by the cinematography. “Nothing can inspire me because my process is action,” she says. “But the movie has stayed with me since I saw it last year. My brain is reflecting a lot on how it starts with the bad news that she might have cancer. But there isn’t a beginning or end. It’s just what happens in the middle.”