Standing at the entry of her Tbilisi-based gallery, LC Queisser, dealer Lisa Offermann noted that the differing heights of the building’s door frames pointed to Georgia’s palimpsestic past as an independent republic. Georgia once belonged to the Russian Empire and more recently was annexed by the Soviet Union. Until three years ago, Offermann and her husband, Nika Lelashvili, had lived in the back section of LC Queisser, behind a curtain; that room is now an additional gallery space.
“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.
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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.