Villa Atrata is a contemporary art project focusing on international artists developing its activities in two different venues : Villa Atrata, Angles-sur-l’Anglin and Villa Atrata Palais Royal, Paris.
STORY
Taking its name from the painting in Francis Picabia’s Transparences series, Villa Atrata becomes a sign of what lies outside the realm of normal expectations.
Gil Presti opened Villa Atrata in May 2022 with an exhibition of Nick Mauss, following 20 years as co-founder of formerly Campoli Presti London & Paris, presenting exhibitions by historical figures such as Martin Barré, Marcel Broodthaers, Sarah Charlesworth, Michael Krebber, Franz West, Pistoletto. With contemporary artists Katherine Bradford, Liz Deschenes, Rochelle Feinstein, Jutta Koether, Nick Mauss, Amy Sillman, Cheyney Thompson, John Miller, Eileen Quinlan, Blake Rayne, Reena Spaulings at the core of its program.
Villa Atrata is a site for exhibitions, research, production and residencies. It is deeply intertwined with the river Anglin and its middle age chapel, carefully repurposed for viewing and producing art in direct contact with nature.
Villa Atrata Paris extension – opened in October 2023 – is a single room gallery space providing an intimate and focused environment in the historical Jardin du Palais Royal. The Palais Royal has been over four centuries the cultural heart of Paris, located in the center of the city, a few steps from the Louvre Museum and Pinault Collection Bourse du Commerce. Each artist is invited to show an important work of art or a coherent body of work.
CURRENT EXHIBITIONS




NINO KAPANADZE
CAVALCADES
Solo exhibition, 5 June – 5 July 2025
30 galerie de Montpensier
Jardin du Palais-Royal
75001 Paris
Villa Atrata is pleased to present Cavalcades, the fifth iteration of Nino Kapanadze’s ongoing Horserace series, inspired by ceremonial horse races held annually in the Caucasus Mountains. Since 2021, the artist has created one diptych each year, allowing viewers to follow the steady evolution of the project. Cavalcades features two new paintings created specifically for the gallery’s space at the Jardin du Palais Royal, shown alongside a selection of works on paper.
As in the previous diptychs, each canvas is divided by a distinct horizon line, evoking field and sky. Upon this landscape background, the artist inscribes დოღი [Doghi] — meaning “horserace” in Georgian — in the Mkhedruli alphabet. Mkhedruli, which literally translates as “cavalry”, derives from mkhedari, the Georgian word for “horseman” or “knight”. The flowing cursive of the Mkhedruli script echoes the movement of galloping horses, yet what may initially resemble mere calligraphy slowly reveals itself as an exploration of gesture, rhythm, and the tension between presence and absence. Nino Kapanadze plays with the motif of the horse : rather than depicting the animals directly, she captures their essence through dynamic, vertical brushstrokes, contrasting with the horizontality of the background and suggesting their grace and velocity.
Composed around this strong horizontal dynamic, the exhibition engages in a conceptual dialogue with the vertically structured works of her Waterfalls series — produced during her residency at Villa Atrata in Angles-sur-l’Anglin and presented simultaneously in the village chapel.
Nino Kapanadze (b. in 1990, Tbilisi) is a Georgian artist who lives and works in Paris. She graduated from the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris, Sciences Po Paris, and the Faculty of Architecture at the Academy of Fine Arts in Tbilisi, Georgia.
Her work has been featured in several exhibitions in France and internationally, including: Cavalcades, Villa Atrata, Paris, France, 2025; Cascades, Villa Atrata, Angles-sur-l’Anglin, 2025; Studio Conversations, David Zwirner, Paris, France, 2025; Rendezvous, Fondazione Bonollo, Thiene, Italy, 2025; Meet me by the Lake, Clearing, New York, USA, 2024; Horserace (Doghi), LC Queisser, Tbilisi, Georgia, 2023.
Upcoming solo exhibitions: Clearing, New York / Los Angeles, USA, 2025.
Selected collections: Lafayette Anticipations Foundation (France); Noewe Foundation (Lithuania); Sigg Art Foundation (France), Fondazione Bonollo (Italy).











NINO KAPANADZE
CASCADES
Solo exhibition, 24 May – 22 June 2025
Chapel Sainte-Croix, Villa Atrata | 86260 Angles-sur-l’Anglin
Nino Kapanadze’s painting stands out for its approach that is both intuitive and conceptual, with each canvas becoming a sensory space imbued with mystery — an invitation to contemplation. Oscillating between abstraction and figuration, her work explores the shifting thresholds of perception, guided by a deep sensitivity to material and light. Color, applied in diaphanous, almost translucent layers, gives rise to suspended atmospheres—dreamlike spaces where evanescent subjects seem to float, visible yet elusive. Though enigmatic in appearance, her works remain deeply evocative: for Nino Kapanadze, painting is a space of dialogue—between natural elements, cultural traditions, personal memories, and history at large.
Created during her residency at Villa Atrata in Angles-sur-l’Anglin, the Waterfalls series, composed of eight paintings, explores the passage of time through the motif of the waterfall. Formally, these works lie at the heart of a spatial research centered on vertical dynamics, creating a conceptual intersection with the horizontal compositions of her Horserace series (initiated in 2021), which focuses on the motif of the horse. Presented free-standing within the Sainte-Croix chapel, the Waterfalls assert a sculptural presence and fully inhabit the space of this spiritual site, intimately connected to the Anglin River. The natural stones, collected locally, evoke the old abbey church, half of which was destroyed. The artist assembles them in front of the altar as an offering, a return of what was once lost and now serves as the foundation for the installation. The images thus resonate with the village’s aquatic and mineral surroundings, revealing the sacred dimension of waterfalls—both in nature and in the human imagination:
Fast falling
That never un-falls
Through your vacuumed veins
How long ago did the spilling occur
If anyone thought you could be born yet
Was the first sacrifice already burnt?
Nino Kapanadze
UPCOMING EXHIBITIONS

ELENÉ SHATBERASHVILI
CRIMSON
Curated by Lillian Davies
28 June – 20 July
Opening 28 June 2025
Chapel Sainte-Croix, Villa Atrata | 86260 Angles-sur-l’Anglin
Returning to Angles-sur-l’Anglin a year after she was in residency there with Villa Atrata, Georgian painter Elene Shatberashvili presents Crimson, an exhibition of new paintings and drawings as well as a sound installation conceived specifically for the Villa Atrata exhibition space, Chapel Sainte Croix. Named for the Holy Cross, the True Cross of Christ’s crucifixion, the interior plaster walls of this desacralized structure bloom pale pink. The site is what remains of the nave of a once larger church, part of the 11th century Abbey of Sainte Croix, destroyed during the French Wars of Religion.
Preparing for this exhibition, Elene also explored another local historic site that links to her ongoing fascination with the enigmatic form of the cave. More than ten thousand years before the Bishop of Poitiers erected Abbey Sainte Croix, a Magdalenian community made their home on the banks of the Anglin. Stone tools, beaded jewelry and low relief wall carvings inside limestone caves, the so-called Roc-aux-Sorciers, testify to a complex prehistoric civilization. In the mid 20th century, a trio of Europe’s very first female archeologists discovered a depiction of three female nudes in the chalky caverns shaped by the river’s flow. Headless, these unique figures are distinguished by their round bellies, curved hips and soft clefts. Like primitive icons, their forms would have shimmered in firelight as portals for reproduction, pleasure and life, colored in a lunar cycle of bleeding.
For Paintings and Drawings, last fall at Villa Atrata, Palais Royale, Shatberashvili introduced the motif and deep crimson of the poppy flower. At Chapel Sainte Croix, she fully devotes herself to the color red. Religious iconography consistently at the heart of her work, Shatberashvili explores the fluidity between figurative and abstract, a painterly expansion from the real to the beyond. Symbol of somnolence, death, and relic of the Passion of Christ, the poppy’s delicate petals and stem return here in Shatberashvili’s immense, astral landscapes. In oil on canvas, the artist’s liquid finish and river of sinuous brushstrokes shape her compositions’ depths, possibilities for refuge and form. The spheres that emerge in these canvases evoke both the force of the full moon and the timeless mystery of the human skull. It is important to note as well that in traditional depictions of the Holy Cross, raised on Mount Golgotha, a skull rests at its base, signaling transition to the ambiguous realms of death and dream. Shatberashvili’s painting echoes the iconic composition, as well as this site’s layered history and a local rumor. Though no evidence has been found, some say a saint lies buried beneath the floor of this chapel.
Though she has long studied Byzantine icon painting, this summer, for the first time, Shatberashvili shows her work in the technique. Her icons now on view at Pompidou Metz for the Louvre exhibition Copyists, here, at the chapel, her work in tempera on wood invokes the seven sleepers of Ephesus. According to Christian legend, in the third century, seven youths, persecuted by the Roman emperor for their faith in Christ, hid inside a cave near the Mediterranean shore. In damp darkness, they fell asleep, waking two centuries later in a sort of miraculous resurrection. “The image really stayed with me,” Shatberashvili says. The cave is a constant enigma in her work.
As if to activate the steeple bell, now silenced on the chapel’s stone floor, Shatberashvili bathes this high ceilinged, practically cavernous space, with her recording of cow bells from a mountainside in Georgia. Evoking, in one stroke, the Nativity and a resonating call to prayer, Shatberashvili’s sound work creates an immersive environment that recalls a very specific place: her family’s native Imereti region and their village, Svari, meaning vineyard. Wine country, still producing the burgundy liquid that symbolizes, transubstantiates, some believe, into Christ’s blood.
Like religion, art relies on belief. One might imagine that visitors to this sweeping stone space, filled with Shatberashvili’s works on wood, canvas and paper, follow in the footsteps of Ephesus’s holy septet. There are times when entering an artist’s exhibition means escaping the suffering outside. And there are moments too, when one stays, suspended, by faith, as if for an eternity, or nearly.
PAST EXHIBITIONS
Nick Mauss, Likenessess
21 May – 29 October 2022
Villa Atrata, Angles-sur-l’Anglin
Megan Francis Sullivan, Likenesses
21 May – 29 October 2022
Villa Atrata, La Roche Posay
Dustin Hodges, Pink Shadow
27 May – 1 August 2023
Villa Atrata, Angles-sur-l’Anglin
7 June – 1 July 2023
Villa Atrata Palais-Royal
Sophie Reinhold, Prediction of Forecast
23 September – 11 October 2023
Villa Atrata, Angles-sur-l’Anglin
15 October – 11 November 2023
Villa Atrata Palais-Royal
Karen Swami, Bas-reliefs
2 December 2023– 13 January 2024
Villa Atrata, Paris
Cheyney Thompson, f(torse)
10 February – 16 March 2024
Villa Atrata, Paris
Leonor Fini, Erotic Drawings
19 March – 11 May 2024
Villa Atrata, Paris
Guillaume Dénervaud, Thulite
18 May – 30 June 2024
Villa Atrata, Angles-sur-l’Anglin
25 May – 13 July 2024
Villa Atrata, Paris
Elené Shatberashvili, Paintings and Drawings 7 September – 8 October 2024 Villa Atrata Palais Royal
Madeleine Roger-Lacan | Pierre Klossowski
13 October – 23 November 2024
Villa Atrata Palais Royal
Benoît Platéus29 March – 12 April 2025Villa Atrata Palais-Royal
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Villa Atrata Angles-sur-l’Anglin
26 Rue du Pont
86260 Angles-sur-l’Anglin
The exhibitions at the chapel are open on
Saturdays and Sundays from 2PM to 6PM, or by appointment.
Villa Atrata Palais Royal
30 Galerie de Montpensier
Jardin du Palais Royal
75001 Paris
Tuesday – Saturday from 12PM to 6:30PM

Gil Presti
Villa Atrata
86260 Angles-sur-l’Anglin
Chapel St. Croix
26 Rue du Pont
86260 Angles-sur-l’Anglin
The exhibitions at the chapel are open to public
Saturday and Sunday from 2PM to 6PM
or by appointment
Atrata Paris
30 Galerie de Montpensier
Jardin du Palais Royal
75001 Paris
Tuesday – Saturday from 12PM to 6:30PM