Is it possible to say goodbye to something or someone that has been part of our life? Is it possible to leave behind what lives and perhaps will live forever inside us? Leila Erdman Tabukashvili’s exhibition “The art of saying goodbye”, at A PICK GALLERY (Turin seems to be a constant recollection of this impossible farewell. The intimate and profound desire to distance oneself from the past clashes with elements that instead seem to want to retain, rather than let go, everything that has been experienced.
Leila Erdman Tabukashvili, “The art of saying goodbye”, installation view, 2025, courtesy A PICK GALLERY, Torino. Ph. Francesca Cirilli
The exhibition develops by combining photographs of people and landscapes that the artist has encountered throughout her life, thoughts and phrases, which, when compared with the images, create a climate of suspension that opens the scenario to different interpretations. Figures of young people cohabit the exhibition space with the artist’s thoughts and poetic ideas. In Leila’s sentences the reference to farewell is constant. With intimacy and irony, they arouse in those who read them a very strong impulse of liberation. By dialoguing with the image, the artist’s words put the “small” detail of the situation taken in contact with the “big” thought that through writing is reconnected to it. But the finitude of the moment now concluded and the infinity of the sensation it arouses, coexist in the exhibition not only through the artist’s works.
Leila Erdman Tabukashvili, “Was it enough what we have done, my love?”, fine art print on cotton paper, cm 65 x 97, courtesy the artist and A PICK GALLERY
They do so also through the installation, which invades the exhibition space with various objects, amplifying the union of detail and thought that is at the basis of Leila’s poetics. Some of these are hung on the walls, others are placed on a piano that was played on the day of the exhibition’s opening by the artist herself, others are positioned on shelves, or simply placed on the floor. Shells, small soldiers, feathers, pieces of paper with simple but powerful phrases, boxes and toys: a repertoire of elements that hark back to childhood memories, to moments gone by, to the little things that accumulate over the course of life and from which we struggle to distance ourselves due to their emotional value.
Leila Erdman Tabukashvili, “Not now, can you call me later?”, fine art print, ed. 1/7, cm 18 x 27, courtesy the artist and A PICK GALLERY
The exhibition focuses precisely on this theme: saying goodbye while keeping within us what has been. It is a tribute to this goodbye because as the artist says «to move forward you have to leave the past behind», only in this way we’ll be able to open up to a new horizon, a new experience, a new love. Born in 1995 in Siberia, she lives and works between Tbilisi, New York and Tel Aviv, constantly traveling to discover new experiences, faces and stories. The people she meets along the way become a mirror of the reality to which they belong, uprooted from their context they tell stories that can only be perceived but that, thanks to Leila’s sentences, open up to infinite horizons of meaning.
Leila Erdman Tabukashvili, “My heart beats faster when I think of Georgia”, fine art print, cm 27,5 x 40, courtesy the artist and A PICK GALLERY
Wars and social crises speak through young people, the main subject of her works: young people, she says, are those who have the greatest strength to move forward, to start over. It is the time of irresponsibility, the time of infinity, «you can change your mind every day when you are young, “young people still have the courage to fall in love». So this eulogy of farewell, which increasingly takes the form of a party to celebrate, portrays young boys and girls immersed in their lives from which the artist uproots a moment, a moment that becomes an eternal representation of that new beginning that only farewell can give.
Samuel Tonelli
Info:
Leila Erdman Tabukashvili. The art of saying goodbye
06/05/2025 – 28/06/2025
PICK GALLERY
Via Bernardino Galliari, 15/C – Torino
www.apickgallery.com
Always connected to the art world, Samuel Tonelli attended the course in Art Education and Communication at the Academy of Fine Arts in Bologna and furthered his studies with the two-year master’s program in Education and Cultural Mediation of Artistic Heritage. After gaining experience mediating in various exhibitions and teaching art history at the art high school in Bologna, he developed a passion for art writing, which he sees as a powerful means of expression capable of opening up visions, broadening horizons and enriching the understanding of diverse perspectives on reality.
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