Former Ferroalloy Plant Hotel Claimed

Location: Zestafoni Artist: Demur Basheleishvili Year: 1981, 1983 Dimensions LxHxW in cm: 1300 x 310 Photo Credits: Irina Kocak   Former Ferroalloy Plant Hotel. 1983. Author: Demur Basheleishvili. Demur Basheleishvili’s mosaic “Land of Winegrowers and Metallurgists,” in which the author characterized Imeretia’s historical function in a symbolic approach. The work’s composition is a triptych in which all three components are joined by a symmetrically balanced framework. This sort of composition is peaceful and silent, generating a sense of self-affirmation and conveying profundity and philosophy rather than an illustrated description or an event. Indeed, the middle section of the piece serves as both the composition’s axis of symmetry and its conceptual core. It features a woman dressed in snow-white traditional attire. According to the author, this woman embodies two of the most essential ideals in Georgian tradition: motherhood and eternal femininity (in the Georgian language, where nouns do not have a masculine or feminine gender, such fundamental definitions for mankind as Earth, the Earth Axis, the Capital, the Ocean, etc. are semantically associated with the concept of motherhood). The author symbolically represented members of the ancient people Halib – (“historical forebears of the Georgians,” according to the author), to whom the creation of ironwork is credited, in the left section of the composition, grouping them around the steel ladle. The author represented the process of creating wine from ripe Imereti grapes on the composition’s left side. Furthermore, at the forefront of his monumental work, the artist featured a boy playing the ancient Georgian wind instrument “salamuri,” which represents Georgians’ creative energy. Project is co-financed by the Polish development cooperation program of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Poland