Elene Sturua

Elene Sturua is a painter whose large-scale oil works investigate the external and internal presences of conflict, tension, and disruption. Her practice is informed by the ongoing Russian occupation of her homeland, Georgia, where over 20% of the territory remains annexed. This sustained political aggression generates a lingering state of liminality and unease, unspoken yet ever-present, permeating both the conceptual and visual space of her work.

Elene’s process is a negotiation between control and unpredictability. Preparing her own grounds and paints, she embraces the irregularities of the materials as extensions of the themes she explores. Rather than seeking resolution, she allows the work to function as a site of inquiry, where psychological irregularities are permitted to surface.

Drawing on personal memories, family and cultural histories, literature, mythology, plays, and photography, her paintings collapse temporal and cultural boundaries. By juxtaposing symbols of war with mundane or ambiguous imagery, she constructs visual friction between overt power and the quiet disruptions of daily life. Figures in her paintings are often isolated within ephemeral settings, yet their gaze interrupts this solitude. The moment of encounter becomes unstable: when does passive observation turn into active confrontation? In these onlooks, she examine asymmetries of power embedded in acts of looking: who gets to observe, who is made visible, and who remains unseen.