Art by Lika
Lika Shkhvatsabaia paints large abstract canvases in Madrid. We built her a catalogue for 136 works, twelve years of exhibitions and press, and a biography in English and Spanish, and kept everything on the page quiet enough to let the paint lead.
- Client
- Lika Shkhvatsabaia, painter
- Based
- Madrid
- Scope
- Design, engineering, content migration
- Languages
- English, Spanish
- Catalogue
- 136 works in six series
- Live
- artbylika.com ↗
Lika's old site had grown one page at a time. Her paintings sat in separate galleries with captions in mixed formats, her exhibitions lived inside blog posts, and a visitor looking for one series or one show had to hunt for it.
She needed a catalogue with a clear structure: each series in one place, each work with its title, medium, size and year, and her exhibition history where a curator would look for it. She also needed to keep it current herself, without calling us every time she finished a canvas.
Every painting at its real size
Most portfolio sites crop each work to the same tile, and you lose the first thing a collector asks: how big is it? We laid out each series at true relative scale. A 55 cm canvas takes up about a third of the width of a 150 cm one, and every row hangs from a shared line, the way works hang on a gallery wall.
We pack each row with about 2.6 metres of canvas and never crop a painting. The photograph sets the frame, so you see the whole work, edge to edge, at its size relative to its neighbours.
She still edits in Wix
Lika already knew her way around Wix, and we had no reason to make her learn a new tool. Wix stays her editor. She adds a painting to a gallery the way she always has, writes the title, medium, size and year in the caption, and publishes.
Every night our build reads her galleries and blog through the Wix API, rebuilds the site and publishes it by morning. She changes, adds and removes work on her own, and we wrote her a short guide to the caption format so the site can read each entry.
Twelve years, put back in order
Moving the archive meant reading all of it. Our first pass through her galleries found 108 works. A full inventory of the site turned up 549 media files, and 433 of them were exhibition, studio and award photographs buried in old blog posts. We recovered every one into a dated record of exhibitions, press, events and awards going back to 2014.
The captions needed the same care. On 81 of 107 works the dimensions ran in the opposite order to the photograph, so a literal reading would have hung half the canvases sideways. The site reads orientation from the photograph instead, and each work keeps a permanent catalogue number.
Quiet enough for the paint
We took our cues from contemporary gallery sites such as LC Queisser in Tbilisi: black, white and one grey, with no accent colour at all. Her paintings supply the colour. A monospaced face sets every caption, size and date, and a serif carries her biography and statements.
A fixed rail on the left holds her name, the navigation and her contact details, and the paintings take the rest of the screen. On a phone the rail folds into a header, and each work runs the full width of the screen.
- Framework
- Astro, a static build with English and Spanish routes
- Content
- Wix galleries and blog, synced every night through the Wix API
- Privacy
- Self-hosted fonts, and videos that send nothing to YouTube until you press play
Lika runs the catalogue herself. When she finishes a canvas she adds it in Wix, and it appears on the site the next morning in the right series, at the right size.
Since launch, several people in the art world have seen the site and asked us to build theirs.