Davit Botchorishvili (BOTCH) is a Georgian-American visual artist whose practice explores attention, perception, memory, and the shifting boundaries between self and space. Working across painting, photography, sculpture, installation, and curatorial practice, he creates perceptual environments in which sustained looking becomes an active form of encounter.
Born in the Republic of Georgia during the collapse of the Soviet Union, Botchorishvili’s early life was shaped by political upheaval, displacement, and the transformation of social systems. These experiences cultivated an enduring awareness of instability, resilience, and reconstruction. His movement across geographical and cultural contexts, from Georgia to Central Europe and the United States, continues to inform a practice grounded in change and the evolving nature of identity.
Practice and Process
Botchorishvili approaches the image not as a fixed meaning but as a threshold: a site where perception can be slowed, unsettled, and reorganized. His process begins with sustained observation rather than a predetermined outcome. Through repetition, layering, erasure, circular structures, blur, reflective surfaces, and concentrated fields of color, he allows forms to emerge gradually through the act of making. Material decisions become a means of testing how an artwork might transform attention from passive seeing into a physical and psychological experience.
Rather than positioning viewers as detached observers, his work invites them to become participants within unfolding perceptual fields. Meaning is not delivered all at once; it develops through duration, proximity, movement, and encounter.
This inquiry extends into Botchorishvili’s curatorial practice, where the exhibition itself becomes a spatial and relational medium. By composing dialogues among artworks, materials, architecture, and viewers, he creates situations in which meaning remains open and emergent—revealed through the experience of looking, moving, and being present.