Kandelaki Art: Three Generations
Andro Kandelaki
Andro Valerianovich Kandelaki, was born in Gatchino in the outskirts of St. Petersburg in 1916 and left for Georgia with his parents in 1918 as a result of the Revolution. He spent his first years in Kutaisi where he studied architecture in the Railway Technikum. Although Andro had shown great artistic talent as a boy and as a student in the technikum's architecture program, he entered the Tbilisi Institute of Railway Transport where he received his degree in 1940 just prior to the outbreak of World War II.
While at the Institute he continued to develop his artistic talents and began to contribute caricatures and political cartoons to satirical journals such as Niangi, the Georgian equivalent of the Russian journal Krokodil. This work provided him with valuable on-the-job training which served him well when he was drafted into the army in 1941. His satirical drawings and political cartoons soon began to appear on the pages of various Soviet army publications. When he resumed to Tbilisi for a month's leave to visit his wife in October of 1942, he resumed work for Niangi as well as for other periodicals before returning to the front.
Vladimir Kandelaki
Vladimir Kandelaki was born in Tbilisi, Georgia, on June 4, 1943. Vladimir Kandelaki is an Honorary Professor of Tbilisi Academy of Arts, Honored Artist and the Freeman of Tbilisi city, member of the UNESCO International Federation of Artists, as well as possessing an internationally recognized reputation. Exhibitions in various countries of the world and a vast number of his talent’s admirers are evidence of this recognition. His art has been shaped especially by his proud Georgian heritage and dramatic upheavals which affected him, his family and their native Georgia during: the revolution, the civil war and three quarters of a century of Soviet oppression. He has always managed to mingle traditional Georgian intonations with a variety of new trends and directions, in a natural way. His conceptualism is a complex phenomenon of Georgia.
Georgi V. Kandelaki
Born in 1972, (then) USSR, Tbilisi, Georgia, Georgi Kandelaki is a global village artist who creates images that can resonate with the minds and emotions of people from different cultures. Kandelaki can be identified as a non-conformist artist by way of birth into the artistic, rich with traditions, multicultural family of Georgian artist Vladimir Kandelaki. His famous father is a member of UNESCO International Federation of Artists and Honored Professor of Tbilisi Academy of Fine Arts. Georgi’s expressive style is distinctively different from his father. His life in essence is a constant evolution and choice between two worlds. His Georgian and Russian ancestry alongside his innovative art with a specifically American identity combine to create his abstract expressionistic style you see today. Georgi currently resides in SoHo, Manhattan, NY.