Davit Botchorishvili (aka Botch) is a Georgian-born American visual artist exploring how attention shapes what we see, feel, and come to value. Working across painting, photography, sculpture, and installation, he creates works that invite sustained looking and an awareness of how perception changes over time.
His practice centers on perceptual thresholds: moments when an initial impression shifts and viewers become conscious of their own role in making meaning. Memory, expectation, and the surrounding space enter this encounter, shaping what becomes visible and what remains uncertain.
Botchorishvili’s early life in Georgia was shaped by war and displacement. His subsequent movement across cultures informs an enduring interest in how perspective and belonging take shape. These experiences underpin his exploration of the shifting relationship between self and surroundings.
Practice and Process
Botchorishvili treats attention as a material. The time a viewer spends with a work, the distance from which they approach it, and the associations they bring become part of how it unfolds.
Through repetition, layering, erasure, and concentrated fields of color, he explores tensions between stillness and intensity, visibility and disappearance. Circular structures invite the eye to return; blurred images complicate recognition; reflective surfaces bring the viewer into the work. These choices create conditions in which looking can become a physical and psychological experience.
In his paintings, blue fields and red interruptions give this inquiry a particular tension. He explores how color can hold attention, how a surface can suggest both depth and resistance, and how an image may feel different as the viewer stays with it.
His inquiry also considers what surrounds an artwork: the stories attached to it, the setting in which it appears, and the expectations that precede an encounter. This interest extends into his curatorial practice, where placement, lighting, spacing, and relationships among works shape the rhythm of looking.
Across these forms, Botchorishvili invites viewers to notice how meaning develops through their attention—and how looking closely at something can make them more aware of themselves.