Untitled. Srawberry Andreevna 2015

Curator: So, we’re looking at Alevtyna Kakhidze's work, "Untitled. Strawberry Andreevna," created in 2015 using pen and ink on paper. It presents a social scene; quite simple in its execution, but with many layers beneath it. What’s your first reaction to this piece? Editor: It feels like a captured moment, a memory sketched in a rush. The simplicity is charming; there's a raw honesty about it, as though the artist just needed to get it down on paper immediately. The line work is heavy handed and unrefined, it gives it character. Curator: Yes, the seemingly informal linework is key. Kakhidze, with her social-realist leaning, seems deeply concerned with conveying both the visual reality and lived experience of the scene, in a place likely struck by hardship or lacking material comforts, judging by the market stalls depicted and their spartan renderings. The means by which the artist conveys the subject of her image seems deeply ingrained in that subject's identity. Editor: I like that connection. It also makes me wonder about the woman depicted. Is she talking to someone? She's so solitary and disconnected from everything around her. She is quite elegantly rendered in comparison to the objects that surround her. Curator: She’s certainly at the heart of it all, perhaps physically removed from the market but intimately connected through the social and economic threads that make up her life. And the “rawness” we mentioned - you could consider how that links to the wider discussion of folk art practices which embrace utility and function over established “fine art” notions of display. Editor: Right, it challenges the whole notion of what art *should* be. Is it about skill, perfection? Or is it about conveying a feeling, an emotion? Kakhidze makes me question the need for everything to be technically perfect, and consider the potential of imperfection as an emotive aesthetic in and of itself. Curator: Absolutely. Kakhidze encourages us to reconsider artistic conventions by shining light on the ordinary circumstances of making-do, reframing them not as something crude but full of intention and social relevance. The "everyday" takes on significance when we understand the artistic choices as directly linked to their real-world context. Editor: That’s beautiful. Seeing this image now, I'm getting less a simple image and more an artifact - a window into a time, a place, a way of being that holds its own kind of truth. It does make me consider my relationship to "fine art" quite intensely, yeah.