ABOUT
Bio
Lizi Budagashvili (b. 2000) is an artist born and raised in Tbilisi, Georgia, currently based in New York City. She earned her MFA from the New York Academy of Art and her BFA from Ringling College of Art and Design. Her work reflects the life experiences of living far from her motherland, exploring themes of memory, displacement, and belonging.
Exploring themes of childhood, memories, and nostalgia, my paintings capture the longing for simpler times by delving into the ephemeral, mirage-like childhood recollections. This approach shapes my artistic process, enabling me to draw dreamscapes from memory gaps and create ethereal atmospheres through transparent veils that reflect memories after multiple layers of removal and interpretation.
By abstracting distant and unreliable recollections, I invite viewers to reflect on a comforting yet very haunting nostalgia rooted not in a tangible place, but in imagined homelands built of memory stains and glimpses.
The parallels between motherland, childhood, and an idealized past in my work are deeply influenced by my leaving home in the country of Georgia at the age of seventeen. This exploration of having multiple 'homes' while struggling to belong takes form through stained surfaces, magical folk creatures, and dreamlike realms that blur the line between distant memories and reality, blending home and abroad, past and present, dream and everyday life.
