Tamo Jugeli begins at the edge. Even in abstraction, painters typically build out their compositions from a central form, resolving the boundaries of the canvas in response to its demands. Jugeli’s works instead radiate inward from an initial gesture in the margins. In her words, “The edges aren’t closed.” Each painting could extend into the one beside it, or some other realm entirely.

The Georgian, New York–based artist forgoes studies or drawings, working directly in oil in response to earlier forms, tones, or the act of markmaking itself. Jugeli made the large-scale abstractions in From 5 to 7 over the past year, creating the paintings for Karma and Polina Berlin Gallery, respectively, over discrete periods of time. The result is two distinctive but linked bodies of work: the parallel presentations share sensibilities and formal resonances, but each suite has its own set of internal logics. Certain forms recur—gently shapeshifting with each iteration—but rather than solidifying as motifs, their reappearance is, she says, “muscle memory.”

Whereas earlier paintings were denser, tightly composed of interlocking forms, her recent works are more gestural, unrulier. Here, the varied surface textures characteristic of her oeuvre have a liquid quality, as if Jugeli had prolonged oil’s essential fluidity indefinitely. Gauzy washes recede against swaths of glossy black applied thickly like hot tar. Previous layers seep out from beneath more recent passes, as in the scorching orange pooling around a lick of white in Gentle Autumn Rain (all works 2025–26)—an underpainting resisting total submersion. Other passages ripple like moiré. Periodically rotating the canvas as she works, Jugeli allows traces of this process to remain on the surface. Drips in vivid hues plummet or, as if pulled by an unearthly gravity, stream across or upward. In some cases flecks collect in beads, and in others they cascade, like in Quiet Birds in Circling Flight, its weblike rivulets eroding a tract of burnt umber to reveal a butter-yellow strata. Despite the expressionistic associations of the drip, Jugeli maintains a degree of control; in Diamond Glints in Snow, a slash of red has bled only briefly, retaining a linear edge that forms a partial boundary within the composition.

Jugeli’s oil paintings implicate a vast range of modes beyond her chosen medium. The broad, even strokes raked across several works recall screenprinting, while oils thinned to near-transparency echo her parallel practice in watercolor. Moments in paintings such as Gentle Autumn Rain and AU HASARD convey a writerly quality: inky-black, looping cords are calligraphic; a swarm of red trails made with the artist’s fingertips evokes Cy Twombly’s poetic scrawl. Using oil stick, Jugeli etched into the belly of the white form in Diamond Glints in Snow, revealing slivers of its dark underlayer—a play with tone and volume that resonates with the graphic technique of crosshatching.

Throughout From 5 to 7, Jugeli has left slices of canvas bare—intervals of rest amid abundance. These range from expanses to tiny, window-like apertures. Day Transcending Night is a caesura (a break in verse or musical notation) in the form of a painting. A spare geometric arrangement in a pale, rosy field, the work represents for the artist “a pause” essential to the relationships, and rhythm, between compositions. The exhibition title references Agnès Varda’s 1962 film Cléo from 5 to 7, which follows a young woman through Paris as she kills two hours awaiting a potentially fatal diagnosis. Killing, filling, wiling away—all are means of resisting time closing in, of creating movement in suspension. Jugeli’s complexly layered paintings register, like sedimentation, time’s passage and accumulation. Her jostling modes, marks, and surfaces, however, speak to an elasticity that relates more closely to the feeling of time than its chronological framework. Unlike the film’s temporal enclosure, Jugeli’s paintings expand within and beyond their peripheries.

—Sophia Larigakis