The work of Yuri Shakhoyan was shaped in the space between eras and cultures: in the multinational Tbilisi of the 1970s, where the colors of festive lanterns reflected in the Kura River. Back then, a ten-year-old boy drew funny portraits of his neighbors on the walls of houses and created panoramas of battles out of plasticine. These early codes — history as texture, and the human face as a field of metamorphosis — found their development in the artist's mature practice.