Karma presents Hey, Tamo Jugeli’s first exhibition with the gallery, open from January 11 to  February 13 at 7351 Santa Monica Boulevard, Los Angeles. 

Through the act of putting oil to canvas in her intuitive, gestural paintings, Georgian artist Jugeli affirms her physical and psychological existence. In her words: 

In these paintings, the subject is neither fixed nor fully defined, because to be human is to exist in a constant state of becoming. The canvas, like the self, is a space of fluidity—always in motion, always shifting. Each painting stands as a moment of pure existence, unencumbered by anything beyond itself. The canvas is not a space to escape, but one in which to face the reality of my own freedom, my own choices. This is not art for the sake of meaning, but art as a form of pure existence, where the process itself becomes the only truth. 

For this exhibition, I deliberately stayed away from books. It was a choice, or perhaps it wasn’t. It didn’t feel like an intentional rejection, more like a quiet surrender to the absence of that habitual urge to stimulate myself, to keep pulling at the thread of meaning. When I stopped searching for intellectual stimuli, stopped trying to wrap everything in layers of significance, from all the things that might make it feel more important than it needs to be, paintings became even more honest and complex, joyful. It will change again. It’s a shift, yes—but it’s not a breakthrough, at least, not a permanent one. This approach, this way of thinking and making, was tailored to this particular moment, to this exhibition. And even then, unconsciously.  

So, essentially, this entire show is about simplicity—about distilling the ideas we have around art, or the way we perceive it, and by extension, the way we approach life itself. That’s why simply Hey is how I want to start the conversation with a viewer: simply, lightly. It’s the destination I’ve been moving toward for the past two years, after years of nihilism and heaviness. There’s something about leaving things alone, letting them exist without forcing them to mean something.

Jugeli’s expansive approach to markmaking, which ranges from stippled to flowing to patchworked, unites her otherwise multivalent practice. In paintings like Theremin (all works 2024), she bounds her unruly hues with arcing lines. These perimeters delineate fields spanning from untainted ultramarine to earthy orange—pigments she chooses instinctively and mixes on the spot, a responsive approach that is visible in the sections of the work painted wet-on-wet where colors intermingle. The solid black that recurs in her compositions recalls Clyfford Still’s monumental abstractions, while the suggestions of distorted bodily fragments evokes Philip Guston, one of Jugeli’s favorite painters. In Bridge, with its burnished copper ground, vertical slashes seem to sew together a pair of lips, rendering them mute. 

In the ten-foot-tall Puddle of water, Jugeli contrasts mosaic-like squares of color with wide, flat expanses. Horizons running through its central orb suggests a cosmopolitan skyline trapped in a snowglobe. One sees the artist letting thinned-out veils of oil bleed into each other as in Helen Frankenthaler’s Color Field compositions; in Morandi, she sets off vibrant opaque forms with passages of palette-knifed marbling. While Morandi simplified vessels into light, color, and shape, Jugeli breaks her forms apart, letting pattern and hue spill out beyond the boundaries of representation.