April 2, 2026
A specific tension runs through Tamo Jugeli’s newest canvases, where churning, dense clusters of paint meet quiet color fields. At Karma and Polina Berlin Gallery, the paintings function as a single exhibition mapped across two distinct physical realities. In the following conversation, Jugeli speaks about the experience of inhabiting a painting from the inside, the Varda film that gave the show its name, and how working at the largest scale of her career forced her to find a new painter within herself.
PLUS MAGAZINE: You don’t work from sketches or drawings; each mark just responds to what came before it. So what is actually going through your mind when you stand in front of a blank canvas?
TAMO JUGELI: I struggle to describe the state I enter when I paint. It isn’t ecstatic. It has a meditative quality, but that’s not quite right either. It feels at once mechanical and deeply attentive. I’m fully present in what I’m doing, yet at the same time removed from everything. The experience is defined by these kinds of oppositions, which seem to hold without any need for resolution.
There’s also a sense of naturalness to it. The act of painting can feel as unremarkable and necessary as drinking water, walking, or breathing. I don’t question it while I’m inside it; it doesn’t occur to me to justify the action or give it meaning. It simply is. It’s deeply fulfilling, but in a way that doesn’t translate easily into comparison with anything else. That said, it has a disproportionate impact on the rest of my life. If something goes wrong in the studio—if the work stalls or I can’t find that state—everything else recedes. The day narrows around that problem. It’s hard to focus on anything else until it’s resolved, and I get agitated. There’s a dependency on that. When the work is going well, I’m steady and content. When it isn’t, the effect is immediate and total. It creates the sense that this process, however ordinary it may feel from the inside, has a kind of authority over me. It sets the terms for how the rest of the day unfolds.
P: As your process develops, your paintings often retain a sense of openness, especially where the composition meets the canvas’s edge. How does that peripheral openness influence the way a work evolves?
TJ: There are times when the edges close in, and the work feels contained, almost self-protective. Other times, they remain open, and it’s as if a second painting begins there, extending beyond the visible limits of the surface. That openness can shift the balance of the whole piece, making it feel less fixed. Occasionally, I introduce a kind of frame, not literally, but structurally, when the painting needs more definition, something to hold it in place. Without that, some of the paintings are dispersing, which in some cases works, in some it creates chaos. The decision isn’t formal in a strict sense. It comes out of a need to regulate how far the particular painting can extend. In my practice, regulating edges is very important for the overall outcome.
P: You mentioned that you were looking a lot at Arthur Dove for this show. What drew you to his work at that moment?
TJ: Arthur Dove was the only painter I looked at while making this show, and even that only happened midway through. A friend of mine, an outsider artist, not especially involved with art history or abstraction, brought me a book of his work because she felt there was a connection to my paintings. I had known his work, but I hadn’t really spent time with it in any focused way. I started going through the book, and I found paintings with forms close to what I was doing at that moment. The color palette was a little bit similar too. It felt like some connections had been happening in parallel. The book made me very happy.
What affected me most was the scale, not a physical one, but how it translated from page to me. The works are small, but they don’t behave that way. They carry a kind of energy that feels out of proportion to their size, as they could expand without actually changing the size of the canvas. That effect stayed in my mind while I was working.
P: In one of the paintings from the show, Thousand Winds That Blow (2026), there’s a strong contrast between dense, active forms and more open, quiet areas. How did that balance take shape as you were working?
TJ: Everything in that painting, once the center was there, became very intentional. I’m an intuitive painter, but that doesn’t mean I’m not thinking while painting. I often remember this quote from Ingmar Bergman: “I make all my decisions on intuition. I throw a spear into the darkness. That is intuition. Then I must send an army into the darkness to find the spear. That is intellect.” That feels accurate. The first marks come quickly, almost before any decision feels conscious, but after a while, there’s a need to understand what happened and how to carry it forward. With this painting, the “spear” was how to finish it. The way I started it was already unusual for me—beginning from the center and also ending there. Then it became a question of how to let that center float while still giving it enough structure to hold. Sometimes painting is almost like an architectural plan, a construction site. You build from zero, and then you have to work out what can remain light and what needs to carry weight, how space supports form without collapsing it. I remember being very focused while making it to the point of extreme intensity. That kind of concentration doesn’t happen every time. Some processes stay with you more than others, and this one did. I still think about the state I was in while working on it because it felt specific and not entirely repeatable.
P: That movement between intensity and expansiveness also appears in your titles, which often feel dynamic and alive.
TJ: The Karma painting titles came from a poem I found a few weeks before the show opened. It’s called Immortality. My brain just latched onto it and wouldn’t let it go. I was in the studio one day, and most of the paintings were already finished. I was looking around, and the poem came back, playing in a loop; it felt like each phrase could have been describing something in the paintings, so it felt exactly right.
In the Polina Berlin show, one painting is called Sun, Sea and Tangerines (2026). My grandmother, who raised me and with whom I was very close, passed away a few years ago. She has two nieces who look very much like her. Last year, when I was in Georgia, I visited them because I wanted to feel closer to my grandmother. Later, I was scrolling through one of their social media accounts and saw photos that one of them had posted—sun, sea, and tangerines. Something about it was very immediate. I felt like I was there, and that my grandmother was there with me in some form. I felt melancholic but also joyful. That feeling stayed, and when it felt right, I used it as a title.
I see the titles as something that comes after the work, from the viewer’s position, not a source of why or how the painting was made. It doesn’t define the painting; it’s just one reading among many. The work stands on its own, like a mountain, whose presence and impact remain unchanged, no matter what you call it.
P: Thinking about the works as a whole, you’re presenting them across two galleries at once while still holding them as a single exhibition, and I’m curious how that shaped the way you divided the work between the two spaces.
TJ: It’s one show, but in two parts. The sizes, the thickness of the canvas, and even the surface between two galleries are slightly different. I needed those small shifts in materials so I could make two distinct bodies of work. Ideally, you would start at Polina Berlin and then go to Karma, since that’s how the work was made, and I think spotting similarities and differences will be more adventurous that way.
I don’t like the idea of making a group of paintings and then dividing them between spaces afterwards. Each space has its own conditions, so I need to be clear from the beginning where the work will exist. Once that was set, even within a short period of time, the works remained connected while still developing their own differences. It also connects to the title. The show is named after Agnes Varda’s film Cleo from 5 to 7. What I love about that film is its sense of life as something suspended between two points—A and B—where opposing experiences exist at the same time. Cléo is waiting for the possibility of death, but at the same time, something new is beginning in her life. Working on two shows at once has a similar structure. Two presences, two durations, unfolding at the same time within the same stretch.
P: Within that structure, the paintings at Karma are the largest you’ve made so far. What shifted for you when working at that scale without a preparatory plan?
TJ: Working at this scale was a real challenge. It asks everything from you, both physically and psychologically. Your body moves differently, your attention shifts, and the rhythm of work changes. At first, it felt awkward; I resisted it, but after not giving up, I broke through. You learn to inhabit it, and that state is a mix of focus, apprehension, and curiosity for what’s next.
I work across all scales, from the smallest to the largest. Each demands something different, each has its own logic. None are easy. They ask you to mold to their own needs, and that insistence is part of what makes the work exacting. You can’t approach a small painting the way you approach a medium one, or a medium the way you approach a large one, and certainly not a large one the way you approach a small, for each, you need to find a new painter within you, at least, that’s how it feels to me.
