The Sculptor Bringing Steel, Story, and Imagination Into Georgia's Public Spaces

A modern art exhibit featuring a large, sleek, metallic sculpture on a round table, set against a minimalist background with a digital display.

(Source: Erekle Tsuladze)

Stainless steel can be an unforgiving material on which to build a career. It shows everything: the fingerprint left during polishing, the weld that ran a fraction too hot, the proportion that looked right on paper and wrong at three metres. Most sculptors working in Georgia’s classical tradition never touched it.

Erekle Tsuladze did, and kept going.

He is credited with introducing stainless steel fabrication technology into Georgia’s creative landscape, which sounds like a tidy achievement until you consider what that actually required: convincing a field shaped by centuries of stone and bronze that a reflective, industrial material could carry cultural weight. It could. It does.

Part of what makes steel work for Tsuladze is that quality of absorption, the way a polished surface takes in whatever is around it. Stand in front of one of his public pieces, and you see the square, the sky, yourself. The sculpture is not separate from its context. It is built on it. That is not an accident of the material. It is the whole idea.

He creates public monuments, corporate interiors, and large-scale installations. Erekle also runs his own studio where classical training and contemporary fabrication methods run in parallel. The project he considers the highlight of his career involves comics, animations, and global brand ambitions.

Three large, reflective teardrop sculptures on a white pedestal, surrounded by greenery and mountains, with the sun shining in the background.

Born Into a World of Making

Walk into the Erekle family home and art was simply there. Sculptures occupied corners of rooms. Paintings covered the walls. Georgia’s prominent artists passed through regularly, sat at the table, and argued about form and meaning over long meals. For a child growing up inside that environment, making things was not a career aspiration. It was just the texture of daily life.

But there was a competing pull. Football drew him just as powerfully as the studio did. He represented his school team, trained seriously, and imagined a professional future on the pitch. Two tracks, running in parallel, each demanding discipline and physical commitment.

Injury decided for him.

Exhibitions, competitions, and the slow accumulation of a professional identity drew him fully into sculpture.

He still plays amateur football, even though his professional ambitions ended.

A Classical Education With a Contemporary Edge

Erekle Tsuladze trained at Iakob Nikoladze College before continuing at the Faculty of Sculpture at the Tbilisi State Academy of Arts. The curriculum was broad: practical sculpture, fine art theory, fabrication methods, structural engineering. Not just how to make beautiful things, but how to make things that last.

Hands-on studio time in both metal casting and sculptural fabrication extended that education beyond the classroom. He learned how materials actually behave under heat and pressure, long before he began working in steel at scale.

That technical foundation changed how he thinks about finished surfaces. Behind every polished steel curve is a set of calculations: load-bearing capacity, environmental stress, the way a specific urban plaza amplifies wind. His sculptures can survive the Georgian weather for decades.

This engineering fluency is also what made his stainless steel breakthrough possible. The material demands precision at every stage. Erekle brought that precision, combined it with a sculptor’s instinct for form, and introduced a genuinely new visual language into a field with a long and serious tradition behind it.

Seven Monuments and a Growing Body of Work

To date, Erekle has created seven public monuments across Georgia and held four solo exhibitions. He runs his own studio, working simultaneously across contemporary fabrication techniques and the classical methods embedded in his training. The two approaches inform each other constantly.

Recognition has tracked his output closely. He received a scholarship from the President of Georgia. A letter of commendation and official certificate followed from the President of Lithuania. These are not minor honours in a country where sculpture carries genuine civic weight.

Georgia has produced serious sculptors across centuries. Working inside that tradition carries pressure. Tsuladze has consistently treated that pressure as material, something to push against, to use as a reason to find new forms and new technologies rather than retreating into familiar solutions.

A shiny, metallic sculpture of a rabbit with elongated ears, set against a blurred natural landscape and clear blue sky.

Ekemen: A Character With His Own World

Ask Erekle Tsuladze which project matters most to him, and he does not hesitate. Ekemen.

Ekemen began as a sculptural character, a figure Erekle created from scratch, with his own symbolic architecture and an expanding internal mythology. Tsuladze describes the character as an allegory of man: a kind of hero navigating existing reality, carrying the contradictions of the present moment without resolving them neatly.

The figure has since grown far beyond a single sculpture. Around Ekemen now exists a full system: comics, animations, sculptural editions in multiple sizes, and a line of accessories. Erekle treats it as an industrial project as much as an artistic one, a deliberate meeting point between fine art, design, narrative logic, and the mechanics of brand building.

None of that happened by accident. It reveals something consistent about how Tsuladze works. Isolated objects do not interest him. He builds systems. He builds characters. He builds the worlds those characters inhabit, then populates them with meaning.

The project also connects threads from his childhood in ways he probably could not have predicted when he began. Sculpture is obvious. But his love of cinema, of character, visual sequence, and world construction, runs just as deep, and it shows in Ekemen’s DNA. Friends and family have suggested his film obsession might eventually lead him behind a camera.

Erekle is currently working to bring Ekemen to the global market, moving the project beyond Georgia’s borders. It’s an ambitious project, but fits the pattern of a career built on crossing thresholds between tradition and new technology and on the desire to be understood internationally.

A man wearing a black hat and a gray coat sits on a concrete bench in front of a large, reflective dome sculpture. The background features parked cars and greenery.

The Work Still Ahead

Three major projects are currently in progress: two in Georgia and one abroad. Erekle Tsuladze keeps his attention on what is directly in front of him rather than announcing timelines, but the range of the work speaks for itself. Private commissions continue alongside civic-scale monuments. Corporate interior installations sit in the queue beside public sculptures intended for several Georgian cities.

In his life outside the studio, he begins the morning with a long walk with his dog. He hikes, travels, reads widely, cooks, and returns to the cinema as often as his schedule allows. Nature features more in his thinking than any purely urban creative life would suggest.

He builds monuments that outlast the conversations that commissioned them. He invents characters who carry mythologies still being written. Erekle works at the intersection of steel, story and space, in a country old enough to make that a serious undertaking.

About The Author

Nina Kavelashvili writes about art and culture. Her focus is on contemporary visual art and public sculpture. She also explores the work of artists shaping cultural identity across the Caucasus and Europe.