“We really tried to keep it cheap,” Offermann recently told ARTnews, beginning to laugh. But in the six years since they’ve been in business, the gallery has steadily grown and become a recognizable name on the international art fair circuit. It would be difficult to imagine the contemporary art scene in Georgia without them. 

Prior to launching LC Queisser, whose name is a combination of Offermann’s initials and her mother’s maiden name, the Cologne-born gallerist interned with Gavin Brown and worked in commercial galleries in Berlin and Leipzig, including Galerie Kleindienst and Tanya Leighton. She moved to Tbilisi from her native Germany in 2018 to open the gallery with Lelashvili, drawn to the Tbilisi art scene’s dynamism and potential. Lelashvili was a mountain guide who left that occupation in 2020 to help Offermann as a full partner as the gallery grew.

From the beginning, shows featuring a roster of approximately half Georgian and half non-Georgian artists, many of whom are female, filled the space with floating curtains of images on translucent textile, sound pieces, video work, and installations as well as paintings and works on paper. Lisa Alvarado’s 2019 solo show, for example, included free-floating cloth paintings, feather floor works, and an ambient sound piece. 

And LC Queisser’s network outside Georgia is only beginning to expand, with a number of high-profile collaborations. In February, Offermann curated a group exhibition, titled “Host,” at Galerie Frank Elbaz in Paris, featuring both Tbilisi- and Paris-based Georgian artists. In March, London’s Hollybush Gardens hosted LC Queisser as part of the gallery-share program Condo, and, in April, they staged a show via another gallery-share, Constellation Warsaw, at Stereo. After showing at Frieze New York in May, this fall brings two more blue-chip fair appearances: Frieze Seoul in September and Art Basel Paris in October. 

But, on the preview day of the fourth edition of the Tbilisi Art Fair in April, Offermann was focused on the presence of the Georgian president, Salome Zourabichvili, whose security retinue waited outside. At the gallery, Berlin-based Georgian artist Ketuta Alexi-Meskhishvili was opening her solo show, “making food out of sunlight.” In both luminous dye-sublimation prints on aluminum and analog photographs, Alexi-Meskhishvili presented various studies of tulips, a reference to the peaceful student pro-independence protest in 1989 that has since become a national symbol. A four-minute film, Interior, pierced the veil of intimacy surrounding several “house museums,” private collections kept away from Soviet-era censorship.

“There’s a reason the president’s here,” said Won Cha, one of the gallery’s artists, underscoring the import of such an appearance at a commercial gallery by the country’s leader. 

Through LC Queisser, Offermann has brought Georgian artists to the international spotlight and international artists to Georgia. “If we wanted to do it here, we needed to have an exchange with international artists, with the international scene, otherwise it wouldn’t work,” she said.

When LC Queisser opened, they had to figure out how to navigate, framing, crate building, packing, and shipping in a context with little infrastructure. “At the beginning, we received a bit of this ‘Why?’” Offermann said. “It’s not easy because you have to explain to everybody, including the artists, why it’s interesting to show in Tbilisi. So it was also a test for us. But [then] I think people started to see it.” 

Almost as soon as the gallery was up and running, Offermann founded an artist residency program (in partnership with the Tbilisi-based organization Propaganda Network, which aims to make contemporary art accessible) that focuses on bringing artists into the local community, through reading groups, university teaching, or other gatherings. “From my experience working in Leipzig, another peripheral location, I understood how important a vivid exchange is to create visibility for the scene here,” Offermann said. 

Then, during the pandemic, having noted the lack of art-centered bookshops in Georgia, she joined forces with curator Nina Akhvlediani and graphic designer Dan Solbach to open a publishing arm, Kona Books. Beginning with Alexi-Meskhishvili’s Boiled Language in 2020, Kona Books has produced 10 art books and runs the physical bookstore, Posta da Kona, downstairs from LC Queisser, in collaboration with another local publisher, Post Press.

Through one of her artists, Sitara Abuzar Ghaznawi, Offermann met one of the gallery’s most acclaimed artists, Ser Serpas, who is currently featured in the 2024 Whitney Biennial and was the subject of a major solo show at the Bourse de Commerce in Paris last fall. In 2019, Ghaznawi invited Serpas to collaborate on a show at LC Queisser, “Stars Are Blind,” which juxtaposed Ghaznawi’s delicate, wall-mounted boxes with Serpas’s installations using scavenged car parts and hardware. That exchange ultimately led Serpas to participate in the gallery’s residency. “These crossings I really like,” said Offermann. Serpas has since filled the gallery with her well-known bricolage of potent detritus, as well as with more intimately-scaled, ephemeral works.

Offermann has, meanwhile, helped raise the profiles of artists both young and old, including Tolia Astakhishvili, who won the 2024 Chanel Next Prize which comes with €100,000, and Elene Chantladze, the nearly octogenarian self-taught painter to whom she gave a solo booth at Art Basel Paris last year. Offermann first showed Chantladze’s art as part of a virtual exhibition called “13 to Support” (2020), benefiting Georgian artists who were not receiving governmental support. Later that year, Chantladze mounted her first solo show with the gallery, featuring her loose, oneiric, expressive small-scale paintings of figures and landscapes, mostly in gouache and pen on cardboard. 

Astakhishvili is a more recent addition to the program, having first featured in a group show, “In Heat Wind Wounds Holes” (2022). Her architectural installations, unruly intrusions of sheetrock and plaster-board that alter the gallery’s floor plan, blur the boundaries between one reality and the next. It was, Offermann said, “the most demanding, challenging, but rewarding show we ever hosted.”  

A few days after the Tbilisi Art Fair, Offermann and Lelashvili made a drive into the Georgian countryside to the city of Telavi to visit the former home and studio of the late painter Vati Davitashvili, whose work they first showed in 2023. Davitashvili, who was under house arrest during the Soviet occupation, depicted the Caucasus mountains he glimpsed at the end of his street time and again, during different seasons and weathers. With the artist’s grandson, Offerman has worked to catalogue Davitashvili’s paintings, many of which were dispersed among neighbors and friends. In this way, she is also trying to resurrect a key, if underknown, part of Georgian art history as she has been doing with the gallery’s living artists. 

“We try to save what’s there,” she said.

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The central exhibition, which marks the anniversary of that defining moment, is accompanied by a virtual reality component, the first time such immersive technology has been used so extensively to enhance the experience of fine art. This parallel show, “Tonight with the Impressionists,” occurs in a space adjacent to the main exhibition.

The physical show (with a ticket price of €32, or about $35) is on view through August 11 and will travel to the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., in September (without the virtual reality component). Of the 157 works in the exhibition, 39 come from the Musée d’Orsay, 8 from the National Gallery, and the rest from museums and private collections around the world.

The goal of the VR exhibit, which originated with the Orsay, is to have visitors relive the evening of April 15, 1874, when at 8 p.m. the doors opened to the first Impressionist exhibition. “It was a very human moment,” said Emmanuel Guerriero, head of the immersive technology firm Excurio, referring to the historic evening, “so we foregrounded human emotions.” Excurio and Gedeon Experiences coproduced the VR show.

No photographs exist of the historic exhibition, which was hung by the artists themselves. Therefore, “we threw ourselves into an investigation that lasted two years,” said Stéphane Millière, head of Gedeon Media Group.

Rose, a fictional nineteenth-century artists’ model and aspiring artist, leads visitors outfitted with VR headsets on a 40-minute virtual reality experience that relives the opening in Paris. They also travel to Bougival, just west of Paris—a favorite haunt of the struggling young artists whose calling card was painting en plein air—and to the cliffs of Étretat and other key locations where they worked or discussed their shared aesthetic mission.

This careful reconstruction took into account land surveys, aerial photography of the neighborhood and studio, receipts and other documents, the original exhibition catalogue (on view in an exhibition case), letters written by the artists (which nourished the VR script), and reviews by contemporary journalists. It brings to life the venue for the 1874 exhibition: the former Paris studio of photographer Gaspard-Felix Tournachon (known professionally as Nadar), with its luxurious crimson wall hangings and carpet, its tall windows and interior waterfall, and even its façade, which boasted Nadar’s name picked out in red and gold lights.

According to the Orsay exhibition’s co-curator Anne Robbins, Nadar rented the building, at 35 Boulevard des Capucines, to the participating artists for 2,000 francs. These artists had, in late 1873, formed a cooperative society, the Société des artistes peintres, sculpteurs, graveurs, et lithographes, in response to the realities of the Paris Salon, the official venue overseen by the Académie des Beaux-Arts, which had rejected numbers of them in the late 1860s. What they desired was economic and artistic emancipation. Rather than remain beholden to juries and art dealers, these frustrated renegades wanted to find their own audiences and clienteles.

The founding group comprised 22 members, among them now-familiar names such as Claude Monet and Camille Pissarro. Its diverse and eclectic members, whose number had swollen to 31 by the April opening, each paid 60 francs for the four-week run, Robbins told ARTnews, and were meant to enter two works each—though all submitted more, for a total of around 200 pieces. The exhibition, which opened 15 days before the Salon, drew 3,500 paying visitors and garnered approximately 60 reviews.

“It was the first time the public was exposed to so many works called ‘Impressionist,’” said Millière. Indeed, the term arose just 10 days after the opening when journalist Louis Leroy used it to mock the sketchy approach encapsulated by Claude Monet’s Impression, Sunrise (1872)—with its now-famous peach-colored orb hovering above pale gray-blue water. This work is placed in its own room in the Orsay installation, accompanied by pastels of rising and setting suns by both Monet and his teacher Eugène Boudin.

The Orsay exhibition makes a tremendous effort to place the term Impressionism in context. “There’s a myth that this was a movement of scrappy, avant-garde artists,” said the show’s co-curator Sylvie Patry. Instead, “it started with a cooperative project of 31, and they were not all Impressionists. It was more nuanced than that.” Nevertheless, there was the daring of the proposal itself. “Then critics remarked that among [the artists], there was a kernel of audacious ones,” Patry pointed out.

Certainly, a timeline early in the exhibition highlights the fact that a number of the participating artists—Paul Cézanne, Alfred Sisley, Monet, Berthe Morisot, and Pierre-Auguste Renoir—were born within two years of one another, between 1839 and 1841 (with Pissarro and Edgar Degas born in 1830 and 1834, respectively). But what is common to this modest handful of artists was not a particular school or movement but rather a desire to depict modern life; reject hierarchies of class; capture impressions of fleeting instants; and introduce a new way of painting that involved loose, brisk, bold brushwork and a lively play of colors.

This style would pave the way for other important 20th-century artists and movements. But the very fact of the exhibition, which went beyond the 1863 Salon des Refusés in defining itself outside any Salon system, deserves special attention: “This way of [artists] organizing themselves was in itself radical and revolutionary,” said Patry. “It was astonishingly new and independent.”

The Orsay’s physical exhibition (like its virtual one) hews closely to the historical realities of 1874. It is striking how many of the pieces included have been sourced from private collections to achieve Robbins and Patry’s goal: Almost all the works in “Paris 1874” derive from the first Impressionist exhibition, the 91st Salon of that year, or later Impressionist shows.

In the first room, titled “Ruins and Reconstruction,” the curators have provided context for the artworks in the show. Lithographs, including two by Édouard Manet (who declined to participate in the first Impressionist exhibition) depict the tumult of the Siege of Paris during the Franco-Prussian War of 1870 and the bloody rise and demise of the short-lived Paris Commune of 1871.

At the same time, as seen in works such as Louis-Émile Durandelle’s photographs of the construction of the Opéra Garnier, the industrial revolution and recent urban renewal instigated by Baron Haussmann had created new buildings, railroad stations, and parks. The population had doubled, and new lifestyle trends were ascendant. In short, as one of the exhibition’s wall texts notes, by 1874 Paris was in the midst of a revival, teeming with new businesses, luxury shops and entertainment venues.

The exhibition proper begins in the second room, where photographs of Nadar’s studio provide a lead-in to some of the same works that opened the original 1874 show. Drawn from various locations, they convey the shock of modern life. In Renoir’s La Parisienne (1874), from the National Museum in Cardiff, Wales, depicts the French actress Henriette Henriot, known for her roles at the Théâtre de l’Odéon. Chic in her up-to-the-minute dress and hat, she incarnates the new Parisian woman. Next to her, Renoir’s La Danseuse (1874), with her diaphanous bluish-white tulle skirt and pink slippers, is on loan from the National Gallery in Washington. Monet’s street scene Boulevard des Capucines (1873–74), loaned by the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, Missouri, depicts a crush of people through which carriages careen. Renoir’s La loge (1874), now in the collection of the Courtauld Institute in London, depicts affluent theatergoers: he with opera glasses raised, she boldly surveying the crowd.

Further along, a gallery showcases the conservative tastes of the well-heeled Paris Salon, from which the state made its purchases and which would shortly open nearby at the Palais de l’Industrie et des Beaux-Arts. Here, history paintings and monumental biblical and mythological scenes abut genre scenes, landscapes, and “Orientalist” works, many on loan from private collections or institutions such as the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam and the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. Each was displayed at the 91st Salon of 1874.

Salon and Impressionist exhibition artists share the walls in subsequent rooms, as—despite the outward competition between the two shows—overlaps were frequent. Later sections of the exhibition are devoted to paintings from five of the seven Impressionist exhibitions after 1874, when they expanded to include Pointillist painters Georges Seurat and Paul Signac and the budding Symbolist painter Odilon Redon.

While “Paris 1874” includes works by many lesser-known artists, the exhibition concludes with a parade of what are now considered Impressionist masterpieces. The final gallery is filled with such famous works as Monet’s Gare Saint-Lazare (1877) with its puffing steam engine, and ends with Renoir’s Dance at the Moulin de la Galette (1877), all dappled sunlight and shadow.

“Financially, it was not a success,” Robbins said of the 1874 show. “It was a failure.” Only a handful of paintings sold: canvases by Sisley, Monet, Renoir, and Cézanne. By the end of the year, the society was bankrupt. But this financial flop was an achievement with immense implications, forever changing the direction of art history.

“We didn’t want to do an homage to Impressionism, but rather show a precise moment in time, the birth of a movement,” said Patry. Like the paintings it features, the exhibition focuses on a transitory instant, but it was a consequential one.