Guram Abashvili

Abashvili grew up in a two-room flat above a tram depot in Didube and joined the municipal restoration roster at twenty-three. For twenty-six years his job was the ceiling of a sulphur bathhouse in Abanotubani, patching lime plaster over steam that never stopped rising. Slaked lime took the whorls off his right thumb by 1971, and he signed everything afterwards with a left thumbprint pressed into the margin. On Sundays he drove the Kakheti highway with a crowbar and stripped cement-board panels from condemned bus shelters, which is the support for every painting he made.

He aged lime putty three years in a zinc washtub under the stairs, trowelled it thin over the cement board, then let it go hard before painting. The colour is casein, curd begged from a neighbour's goat, ground with ochre and bone black on a sheet of window glass. Until 1979 he worked true fresco and the panels shed: Tbilisi winters dried the plaster before it could carbonate, and faces flaked off in dry chips he found in his shoes at night. The casein held. It also gave him the chalk bloom he wanted, which he pretended was an accident.

Fourteen panels are in the collection, none varnished, because he said varnish makes a wall look like a plate. He refused to paint anyone looking out at the viewer, on the grounds that people waiting for a bus look at the road. He refused enlargements, telling a Munich dealer that a bus shelter is two hundred and forty centimetres and that is the end of the argument. He kept his prices at the level of a good used refrigerator until 2014, raised them once, badly, and complained about it for five years.