Georgian-born, Vienna-based painter Nina Akhobadze (*1997, Samtredia) transforms movement, memory, and perception into immersive fields of color and form.

Her large-scale canvases are alive with gesture: every stroke is irreversible, every mark a decision made in the present. The paintings balance impulse and control, chance and intention — each layer of color and texture revealing both the immediacy of action and the permanence of consequence.

Abstraction, for Akhobadze, is not an escape but an encounter. Her works invite viewers to inhabit space differently, to witness how gestures expand into presence and how repetition never leads to sameness. The absence of titles underscores this openness: each painting is Untitled, waiting for the viewer’s own reflections to take shape.

Rooted in her experience of post-Soviet Georgia — a landscape of sudden freedoms and shifting realities — Akhobadze’s practice mirrors the fragile and persistent process of inhabiting change. Freedom, she suggests, “takes space”: space to unlearn, to reorient perception, and to allow new forms to emerge.

With it takes space, Akhobadze proposes painting as an act of inhabiting — each brushstroke a risk, an affirmation, and a reminder that forward is the only possible movement.