Modern Art’s Bury Street space opens “Sometimes Ballerina, Sometimes Priest, in Reality, a Murderer”, a door back into the mentally and politically most intense periods of Karlo Kacharava. Sketchbooks from 1991–92 and paintings dated 1988–93 gather once again all the ghosts that haunted the artist’s short yet luminous production line.
Kacharava’s approach of intertwining text and image is not merely an aesthetic language; it is an intuitive response to the chaos of his era, to information overload, and to the prevailing state of mind. His drawings are a flow where the unconscious mixes with the agenda, words seep into images, and images turn into writing.
Exactly like the title itself: delicate as a ballerina in one tone, solemn as a priest in another — yet in reality pointing to the darker impulses within the human being, almost like a confession.
The recurring note “Dreams of Mzhavanadze” in the sketchbooks establishes a mocking relationship with the shadows of post-Soviet cultural memory. The explosive energy of Helmut Middendorf, the grotesque figures of Ensor, the spiritual fragility of Clemente, the narrative entrapment of Ivar Enoksen… Kacharava absorbs all these names into his intellectual panorama, transforming them from direct references into parts of his own memory atlas.
The works in this exhibition reveal Kacharava’s rapid-fire way of gathering thoughts — political notes, pop-culture fragments, artistic allusions, personal obsessions, instant humour — all loaded onto a single surface.
Each drawing feels like an attempt to capture the speed of a mind.
Each painting is a pulse holding the cultural turbulence of the time he lived in.
Kacharava’s world never offers a straightforward reading.
The lines always seem as if they are “about to go somewhere else.”
The writings feel torn from a sentence even he never finished.
The figures change roles instead of carrying a fixed identity: one day a ballerina, one day a priest — in reality, each is another face of the contradiction inside us all.
Modern Art’s second Kacharava exhibition makes visible not only the artist’s production but his mental wanderings.
His images do not tell something — they pass over something.
Exactly like the exhibition title:
They stand in that tidal zone between who we are, who we want to be, and who we are forced to be.
Exhibition Details
Karlo Kacharava – Sometimes Ballerina, Sometimes Priest, in Reality, a Murderer
Modern Art, Bury Street, London
On view until 29 November 2025
Opening hours: Wednesday–Saturday, 11:00–18:00
7 Bury Street, London SW1Y 6AL
Apartman No:26 Note
Kacharava’s works are special because they visualise the flow inside an artist’s mind without stopping it. This approach — leaving the speed of thought, the scatteredness of knowledge, and the fragility of intuition exactly as they are — feels close to No:26’s sensitivity for “seeing in the raw.” The exhibition reminds us that note-taking, doodling, and preserving the unfinished can also be a channel of art history.
