Irena Popiashvili is Dean of Visual Arts & Design School of the Free University and runs an art space –Popiashvili Gvaberidze Window Project– in Tbilisi, Georgia.
Ilya Repin.
Ivan The Terrible And His Son Ivan On November 16. 1581.
Oil on canvas.
Courtesy of Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow.
I think my aesthetic experience, the first one I remember, started in school - in Soviet history textbook at the end of the USSR History book were bad reproductions of paintings. I used to look at those images, really bad reproductions of Russian 19th century painting, Repin's Ivan the Terribly killing his son etc. but I was so bored in that class that I really studied every detail of those paintings. Later, at home I used to look at Dresden Museum collection reproductions -. My aesthetic experiences are connected to the disappointment i experienced when faced with the originals - not particularly this Russian paintings but any western artwork - I studied and fell in love with them through the bad reproductions, so when I first saw Mantegna's dead christ at Pinoteca di Brera I was super disappointed and had to go back to love the original the way I loved the bad Soviet copy.
Irena Popiashvili