Gogi Chagelishvili created his self-portrait from a cloth that he had used for some time in his studio to wipe his hands. These canvases with traces of paint that he had used at various times best depict his life, since his life is that of an artist, and his studio is the arena of his most intense contemplation. Besides the image created using the cleaning cloth, he also included in his self-portrait fragments of ideas written on scraps of paper. The language of collage was especially close to Chagelishvili as a representative of the generation of Georgian artists who emerged in the latter half of the 1960s. This was the time following Khrushchev's liberalization, which afforded relative independence to the Soviet Union's creative sectors. However, only artists with remarkable skills and vision were able to take advantage of this opportunity, and break free from the restraints of socialist realism.