D’ART Gallery is pleased to present Grotesque, a focused exhibition exploring the many faces of the grotesque in Azerbaijani fine art. The exhibition forms part of Fly to Baku. Art Weekend. Sense the Future NOW.

Bringing together works by prominent Azerbaijani painters and sculptors, Grotesque examines a visual language shaped by distortion, satire, irony, symbolism, and the absurd. Across painting, graphic art, and sculpture, the exhibition reveals how artists transform the human figure, disrupt familiar realities, and expose the tensions underlying individual and collective experience.

Rather than treating the grotesque solely as a mode of exaggeration or deformation, the exhibition approaches it as a complex aesthetic and philosophical category. It becomes a means of questioning social conventions, confronting contradictions, and articulating the instability of contemporary life. Through unsettling images and unexpected forms, the works invite viewers to reconsider the boundaries between the beautiful and the disturbing, the comic and the tragic, the familiar and the strange.

Rooted in the curator’s academic research, the exhibition offers an in-depth examination of the grotesque as an artistic language within Azerbaijani fine art. It traces its diverse manifestations across painting, graphic art, and sculpture while highlighting the distinctive ways in which Azerbaijani artists engage with questions of identity, society, reality, and perception.

Grotesque invites an international audience to encounter Azerbaijani art from a fresh perspective: to look beyond the surface of the image, uncover its concealed meanings, and reflect on the contradictions of the contemporary world through the transformative power of art.

Curator: Dilara Muzaffarli, Art Critic, Founder and Director of D’ART Gallery

Project Coordinator: Sofio Dvalishvili

Dates: 30 October – 10 November 2026