Cubist self-portrait 1914

David Kakabadzé's "Cubist Self-Portrait" is a wonderful stacking of geometric forms, browns, creams, and blacks. It’s a painting concerned with painting, with making, but also with seeing. I imagine Kakabadzé piecing it together, each fragment a thought, a memory, or maybe just the pleasure of a shape bumping up against another. There's a painter's palette right there in the center, complete with a brush, declaring the painting’s subject. Look at how the wood grain is lovingly rendered, a celebration of the material world translated into paint. The patterned pieces on the bottom and top left feel intimate, like glimpses into the artist's personal space, or maybe even his cultural heritage. Thinking about the Cubists like Picasso and Braque, who were all trying to show different sides of things all at once. Kakabadzé takes that idea and makes it his own, creating a self-portrait that's not about likeness, but about the act of seeing and making sense of the world through painting.