Nina Kintsurashvili: Residency in M9

Born in Tbilisi in 1992 and now based in New York, Nina Kintsurashvili works in painting. Her practice is shaped by the condition of mediated access: growing up in Georgia, her encounters with art history, archaeology, and cultural imagery came through books, reproductions, and the second-hand materials circulating through Tbilisi's Bukinist networks of street book dealers. Her parentage runs through the work. As the daughter of a fresco conservator and an icon painter, Kintsurashvili grew up around images in states of damage and repair, and around a tradition in which painting operates through convention as much as through ambiguity. Her paintings sit at the threshold between abstraction and figuration. The tension of her forms accumulate through layered, gestural brushwork that are then partially erased, revised, and overwritten. What remains are shapes simultaneously too ambiguous to name and too decipherable to dismiss. A viewer can, with equal conviction, identify or fail to identify figures, objects, landscapes, or architectural forms within the same passage of paint. Kintsurashvili draws from personal archives assembled across art history and vernacular imagery, source material whose descriptive clarity progressively dissolves as it is worked into the painting. The original reference retreats and what persists are its traces. Abstraction operates here as a gateway to a figurative potential held at the point of visibility. Kintsurashvili holds a BFA from Tbilisi State Academy of Arts and an MFA in Intermedia from the University of Iowa, where she was a Fulbright Award recipient. Solo presentations include Udabno at Konsthall C, Stockholm, and I Met A Traveller at Polina Berlin Gallery, New York (both 2025), alongside Mute Things at Gallery Artbeat, Tbilisi (2023). Group exhibitions include the forthcoming Kyiv Biennial at Warsaw MOMA, and presentations at Paris Internationale (2024), NADA Miami (2024, 2025), and Art Dubai (2025). She is a lecturer at the Free University School of Visual Arts, Architecture and Design in Tbilisi and a co-founder of TOL Collective.