Pagava

Vera Pagava (1907—1988), born in Tbilisi in a family belonging to the Georgian intelligentsia, received her first education at the Tbilisi Academy of Fine Arts before settling permanently in Paris in 1928.

There, she went through the aesthetic changes of the interwar period and the post-war period by affirming a singular position: neither attached to geometric orthodoxy, nor seduced by the dominant lyrical expressionism of the 1950s, Pagava developed a constructed abstraction based on the stability of the plane and the permanence of structural relationships. His regular participation in the Salon des Réalities Nouvelles from the beginning of the 1950s attests to his membership in the circle of artists committed to the defense of demanding non-figurative painting, where internal architecture takes precedence over effect. In his works, the surface is thought of as a field of balanced tensions: stabilizing horizontally, structuring verticals, geometric forms that are open, never closed, articulated around invisible axes that organize the breathing of space.

Drawing, central to his process: proportional studies, research of axes, linear partitions bear witness to precise constructive thinking, where each form is weighed in its relationship to the whole. This formal consistency explains the coherence of a path independent of fashion effects and sheds light on its specific place within the École de Paris.

Works by Vera Pagava are preserved in the collections of the Centre Pompidou, confirming established institutional recognition.