IN PRACTICE: ANA GZIRISHVILI AT SCULPTURECENTER
BY SHEILA CARR
As you step into Gallery B, tucked away in the far-right wing of the SculptureCenter, you are confronted with leather castings that hold remnants of architectural and object histories. As part of the SculptureCenter's 2025-26 In Practice series, an open call for emerging artists, Ana Gzirishvili presents a total of eight new leather sculptures. Gzirishvili, a multimedia artist based in Tbilisi, Georgia, is currently exploring the psychoanalytic concept proposed by Didier Anzieu known as the "skin ego." Her eight new leather husks fill the room as poetic representations of the parallel between the skin as the body's physical container and the mind as the psychic container of the self.
Six of these forms are grounded and arranged in a maze-like composition, prompting viewers to weave around and through them, while the remaining two pieces are pinned to the wall. Each sculpture's earth-toned color gives way to a mix of recognizable forms, such as bricks, belts, and hex nuts, that harmonize with the folds and creases created by a method of sculpting wet leather into its final, rigid configuration. While some of these pieces lay on the ground, they are contorted and frozen in a way that defies physics by allowing the form to stand tall.
Gzirishvili's material choice of leather for this exhibition adds a bodily skin quality that feels visceral, protective, and contains infinite duality. The leather skin looks soft and malleable, yet their ability to wrap, wind, and stand unsupported signals inflexibility. Its bodily quality feels like a protective barrier, yet parts of the sculptures are exposed and vulnerable. It is as if the imprinted objects are swaddled in this hard casing but never fully shielded from their external environment. The physicality of the leather mixed with the ability to see space within each piece becomes a mirror of the container and the psyche. The worn and blemished leather is stiff and unyielding, yet simultaneously on the verge of collapse, evoking a perpetual state of insatiable consumption. What may seem like simple forms become rigorously conceptual objects whose form, material selection, and display reference the body, psyche, memory, consumption, and displacement.
Case is a stiff leather relief resembling an open brief or suit case resting on the floor. As the viewer circles the object, they see that the sculpture's tan leather skin is pierced to create a hole toward the bottom of the fold. The punctured sculpture rests near a thin long crack that spans the length of the SculptureCenter's concrete floors. Whether intentional or not, the placement of this piece acts like a love letter to the building's architecture itself. On the opposite side, the sculpture's open and hollow belly exposes red paint splatters on the inner top half. Gzirishvili's pieces are natural monochromatic colors, but every so often the viewer encounters an addition of a secondary color such as red or pink. In this sculpture, the symbiosis between the form and the purposeful addition of red communicates intensity. The viewer must contend with the undeniable absence that the hollow opening provides, while the color begs the imagination to construct a story of how absence might have once meant a very charged existence. The visceral and deliberate actions involved in constructing this sculpture create an undercurrent of violence and displacement that one could associate with this piece.
Ana Gzirishvili's sculptures solidify the room as a memorial of experience, where imprinted objects draw the viewer into domestic spaces and trace the complexities of lived existence. Her monochromatic leather shells exude a grounding presence, resembling armor recycled across generations. While the gallery room may seem small, the intimacy of the space parallels Gzirishvili's sculptures, whose materiality and form invite the sense that one could slip into the leather shells and merge with these reproduced fragments of the world.
