My Thoughts Go Out To Fellow Artist Hans Heiner Buhr in Tbilisi as Georgia Burns

Hans Heiner Buhr
"Big Horse Thief"
125 X 90 cm
mixed media on a collage of Caucasus Maps
- image courtesy the artist

As Russian forces continue to attack Georgia, my thoughts go out to fellow artist Hans Heiner Buhr in Tbilisi and his compatriots.
Follow the events at the official Georgian site: Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Georgia

- map by the BBC


More at:
Georgia Today
Russia Orders Halt in Georgia as Fighting Continues
A Russian Viewpoint:
A Path to Peace in the Caucasus - Mikhail Gorbachev

Below is a review from Georgia Today written about a recent exhibition by Hans:

"The most striking of the works displayed this past weekend in the exhibition “Horse Thief Sayat Nova Street” by Hans Heiner Buhr at the Baia Gallery is a painted work, called “Big Horse Thief” (125 X 90 cm), set against a collage of Caucasus maps. It portrays a masked gunman on horseback, with a jutting pair of triangular prongs for a nose and mouth. While the oddly conjoined figure of horse and rider gallops away from us, it’s that impossible beaked head — tilted backwards towards the viewer — that startles the eye. Its long twin pincers scissor the air like a switchblade. The pointed nose, explains the artist, is a sign of the permanent outsider, a mark of the harlequin, the pariah. In Georgia, “you can make time jumps. You go to Kakheti and someone kills his neighbor because he’s stolen a sheep.”

"Part spectacle, part Star Wars, this show by Buhr has underground comic-book energy and its simplest graphic images are some of the freshest."