Niko Pirosmani

Exhibition at the Fondation Beyeler, Riehen/Basel, 17 September 2023 - 28 January 2024

Born into a peasant family, Niko Pirosmani (1862 - 1918) arrived in Tbilisi in 1870. Painting portraits and tavern signs for board and lodging, he attracted the attention of the Georgian and Russian avant-garde in 1912, who presented him a year later as the "Rousseau of the East" at the Moscow exhibition Mischén, alongside works by Natalia Goncharova, Mikhail Larionov, Kazimir Malevitch and Marc Chagall.

Pirosmani's portraits, animal paintings, landscapes and scenes of everyday life, painted around 1900 in a flourishing Tbilisi, are inspired by medieval iconography and bear witness to a deeply felt sense of belonging, conveying a poignant empathy. A planned exhibition in Paris never took place because of the First World War. Unknown to many, he is nevertheless Georgia's most famous artist.

Bringing together around 50 major works, this catalogue of the most important international exhibition ever devoted to Pirosmani demonstrates the qualities of this unique artist, a contradictory figure and an important part of the art scene in Tbilisi, considered at the time to be the "Paris of the East".