Name: TRUST ISSUES
Start: 2025-03-01
End: 2025-04-17
Location: KORNFELD Galerie Berlin

KORNFELD Galerie Berlin is pleased to announce the exhibition TRUST ISSUES with works by Saelia Aparicio, Gonzalo Garcia and Rusudan Khizanishvili, curated by Nina Chkareuli-Mdivani.

Saelia Aparicio, The Brat,2024_Ink and wood stain on plywood,osmo finished

"A secret sadness lurks behind the twenty-first-century’s forced smile."

– Mark Fisher

London-based multidisciplinary artist Saelia Aparicio, Mexico-based painter Gonzalo Garcia, and Tbilisi-based painter Rusudan Khizanishvili take up issues of vulnerability, trust, and power while foregrounding their distinct visual modes of expression. These three transgressive artists aim to wake us up through strong visual statements that engage with the wider discourse on integrity and control.

About the Artists

Rusudan Khizanishvili

In her new oil paintings, Khizanishvili uses a play on words and symbols. Painted during the first political protests in Georgia in the spring of 2024, the artist reflects on protective and political covers as a means of controlling societies. Theatrical red covers are part of behind-the-scenes mechanisms she portrays throughout her artistic career.

Some of these mechanisms trace back to Persian miniatures, while others evoke mythological representations of guardians. Khizanishvili’s figures, abstracted from individual characteristics, present human or social dramas. These figures might be pagan or neohuman, with indirect references to Michel Houellebecq's novels. At the center, however, are our souls and their pursuit of harmony.

Gonzalo Garcia

Garcia’s representational oil paintings approach trust, power, and violence in a literal and deliberately transgressive, confrontational way designed to arouse a sense of unreality and disbelief.

Scenes of castration and potential physical or psychological torture dynamically unfold before our eyes. Inspired by 1970s Mexican cinema, particularly films like El Castillo de la Pureza by Arturo Ripstein and Los Cachorros by Jorge Fons, Garcia creates a hybrid history of authoritarian utopia, insisting on gender corrections.

The faceless torturers and victims leave room for viewers to add their own identities and details. Meanwhile, lyrical still lifes, tied to Garcia’s earlier explorations of queer identity, evoke marketplaces and childhood dwellings in Mexico City. These works offer gentler imagery of transformation, surrender, and the freedom to exist.

Saelia Aparicio

Aparicio takes an experimental approach to investigate our place as physical bodies within the era of capitalist realism, as defined by philosopher Mark Fisher.

Her anthropomorphic stools and drawings explore human, genderfluid bodies that are deliberately vulnerable and playful. Sculptures and drawings cross-reference folklore, popular culture, feminism, and materiality—incorporating wood, glass, fabric, and clay.

Aparicio questions how we can remain human and open in the face of oppressive forces. Her answer lies in hope, risk, humor, and experimentation. Between rigid classifications and dualities, she finds fissures where the unknown resides, allowing space for mutant creatures that open a window to the unexpected—beyond the prescriptions of digital structures or apocalyptic narratives.

All three artists employ distinct formalistic devices to explore trust and examine how humanity can navigate this era of uncertainty. It seems only humor, harmony, risk, and art can help resolve our trust issues.

Contemporary Art

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