Elene Sturua (b. Tbilisi, Georgia) is a painting graduate from Edinburgh College of Art. Currently based in Edinburgh, her practice explores how the meaning of images can be recast through large-scale oil paintings. Rooted in both historical contexts and the immediate present, Sturua’s work focuses on a type of world-building, where personal and global events are filtered into a series of vast, ambiguous environments.
Within these spaces, human and animal figures coexist alongside monumental or artificial forms. This process is deeply material; by preparing her own grounds and extensively layering and sanding back oil paint, Sturua gives the images a distinct physical weight and presence. Through colour and form, familiar figures are rendered strange, and symbols of power are recast as something vulnerable, absurd or playful.
The paintings exist as a series of visual ideas underpinned by an internal logic, where the material process allows the image to be translated and reconfigured into a separate, painted reality.
