Levan
Songulashvili

Levan Songulashvili (b. 1991, Tbilisi, Georgia) is a Georgian-born, New York–based artist working across painting, drawing, installation, sound, and moving image. His practice explores the fragile boundary between the individual and the collective, tracing how bodies, memories, beliefs, and histories form the structures through which human experience is perceived and shared.

Born in Tbilisi in the year Georgia restored its independence amid the collapse of the Soviet Union, Songulashvili came of age at a historical threshold, in the aftermath of one order and the emergence of another. This condition of rupture and transformation continues to shape his work, which examines identity not as something fixed, but as something continually formed by memory, migration, social systems, and the invisible pressures of history.

Situated between figuration and abstraction, Songulashvili has developed a visual language of ambiguity, atmosphere, and psychological intensity. In his paintings and installations, figures often appear in states of emergence or dissolution, gathering into crowds, fields, processions, or spectral formations. The image becomes a site where the singular and the collective coexist — where presence is inseparable from disappearance, and where the human figure becomes both subject and structure.

Music also plays a central role in Songulashvili’s thinking. As a self-taught pianist, he approaches composition through rhythm, recurrence, variation, and silence. These principles inform the movement and architecture of his images, where repetition does not simply multiply forms, but creates tension, duration, and emotional resonance.

Songulashvili received his BFA from the Tbilisi State Academy of Arts and his MFA from the New York Academy of Art. His work is held in the collections of the Brooklyn Museum, New York; the BREUS Foundation; the Fine Arts Museum of Georgia; and other public and private collections. He has exhibited internationally at institutions, museums, and galleries including the Royal Academy of Arts, London; the Brooklyn Museum, New York; the National Gallery, Tbilisi; Saatchi Gallery, London; KORNFELD Galerie, Berlin; Objectifs – Centre for Photography and Film, Singapore; and the State Museum of Adjara, Batumi.

In 2018, composer Giya Kancheli encountered Songulashvili’s Idem et Idem during the artist’s solo exhibition. The work later gave its title to Kancheli’s final choral composition, for which Songulashvili created a monumental stage installation for the world premiere in 2019. His interdisciplinary practice has also extended across art, music, and design, including collaborations with Issey Miyake and Jeremy Deller.

His honors include the President of Georgia Award, the Prime Minister’s Scholarship, Artist of the Year, and inclusion in Forbes 30 Under 30.