Elene Shatberashvili at La Verrière

Elene Shatberashvili does not paint scenes. She builds situations. At La Verrière, her exhibition Quatre gathers paintings, furniture and companion works into a space that feels closer to a studio than a white cube — a place where looking is active, physical, and quietly demanding. Born in Tbilisi and based in France, Shatberashvili moves between architecture and painting, structure and intuition. Her canvases turn tables, apples, mirrors and flowers into instruments of perception, where colour becomes a way of thinking and light a form of memory.

Her practice is rooted in slowness, not as a posture but as a method. The paintings are worked, reworked, sometimes covered and reopened, carrying the trace of time inside their surfaces. Reds burn into whites, blues settle into greys, geometry fractures into tenderness. Everyday objects — an egg, a glass, a chair, a phone — hover between still life and self-portrait. They are never neutral. They hold the weight of gesture, of looking, of living.

Quatre brings together around twenty of her paintings spanning a decade, from intimate, almost devotional formats to large, semi-abstract landscapes where space opens and closes at the same time. Around them gravitate artists she considers companions rather than references: Nathanaëlle Herbelin, Jean Claracq, Mathilda Marque Bouaret and Miranda Webster, joined by the quiet, decisive presence of Vera Pagava, another Georgian painter for whom colour was already a way of belonging. Furniture by Rooms Studio and Johan Viladrich anchors the exhibition in the body — tables, chairs, surfaces that remind us that seeing is also a physical act.

Curated by Joël Riff, the exhibition refuses the logic of the isolated masterpiece. It works by proximity, resonance and friction. Painting, design and architecture are not separated but folded into one another, forming a landscape of attention rather than a checklist of works. The space becomes a place to inhabit, not to consume.

What Shatberashvili proposes is neither nostalgia nor spectacle. She works against speed, against distraction, against the idea that images are disposable. Her paintings hold their ground. They require time, and they give something back in return: a sharper sense of presence, a steadier way of seeing, and the feeling that culture still begins with attention.

Practical information
Quatre — Elene Shatberashvili
La Verrière, Fondation d’entreprise Hermès
Boulevard de Waterloo 50, 1000 Brussels
15 January – 11 April 2026
Tuesday to Saturday, 12:00 – 18:00
Free admission
laverriere.hermes.com