Parmen Daushvili was born in Georgia in 1970 where he obtained a degree in engineering and where he was the owner of a successful metals company. He came to the U.K. with his infant son as a refugee after a series of devastating events that saw his life’s work encroached and consequently stolen by criminal elements in Georgia, supported by Russian operators after its 2008 invasion of the country. Surviving several attempts on his life, he finally managed to arrive in the U.K. and having lost everything in his home country, Parmen has stayed a virtual recluse in his modest London apartment, insisting that painting has been his only saviour. His journey to painting reads like a virtual movie script, where reality has been stranger than fiction, beginning with a painting ascribed with his name but not by his hand, which was entered by a third party into a juried art exhibition and consequently selected and shortlisted for a painting prize. In the ensuing confusion Parmen found himself compelled to prove that he was indeed a painter and thus began what has now become a full time practice since over a decade. In his own words, “I became an accidental artist, but it saved me from the slavery of working in that Amazon fulfilment center, where official job services had placed me as an unwanted refugee” The paintings of Parmen Daushvili are survivors of their own making. Much of his works are over-painted, scraped, sanded, re-painted and transformed. The palette is somber and careful, reminding us of mid-20th century modern British and American artists such as Milton Avery, LS Lowry and David Hockney but with a uniquely identifiable style which is both dead pan in its irreverent choice of subjects and also for its economical choice of colour palette. He spends most of his time working in the studio, sometimes up to 18 hours a day. What emerges from Daushvili’s paintings is a humble story of humanity’s most fragile figures, the displaced, the unwanted and the overlooked. Parmen Daushvili treats these figures with an unwavering care that literally saves them from their own making. It is through these irreverent and masterly works that a small group of collecting connoisseurs have discovered him which has so far led to several exhibition inclusions in New York, Paris, Milan, London, Malmo and Basel. The presentation at Patricia Low Contemporary Gstaad marks the first solo exhibition of the artist in Switzerland.