RIEHEN.- As a highlight of the year, the Fondation Beyeler devotes an exhibition to the legendary Georgian painter Niko Pirosmani (1862–1918), as much an enigmatic free spirit as an influential precursor of modern art. Almost fanatically admired by art lovers and celebrated as a national treasure in his home country, Pirosmani is yet to be discovered by a wider Western European audience. Bringing together around 50 key works, the exhibition at the Fondation Beyeler is the most comprehensive international show ever devoted to Pirosmani. It is organised by the Fondation Beyeler in cooperation with the Georgian National Museum in Tbilisi and the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Humlebæk. Renowned contemporary artists Thea Djordjadze and Andro Wekua have been invited to offer their own contributions to the presentation of Pirosmani’s works in Basel.

Pirosmani’s paintings transform the everyday into the exceptional. They are as direct as they are fascinating and mysterious. Most of them are painted with precise and energetic brushstrokes of vibrant colours on black oilcloth. In their combination, Pirosmani’s technique and style as well as his palette and motifs are unique in modern art. Pirosmani mostly painted animals and common people, oftentimes archetypal figures such as a mother and her children, a fisherman, a cook or a postman. Some of his pictures are portraits of specific individuals, as for example the actress Marguerite de Sèvres and the avant-garde artist Ilya Zdanevich. Pirosmani also painted epic, multiperspectival landscapes featuring simultaneous depictions of non-synchronous events such as banquets, hunts and processions. His still lifes of culinary delicacies were often commissioned works, produced amongst others for taverns. Other works depict celebrations and feasts of special significance in Georgian culture. For all their everydayness, many of Pirosmani’s paintings also have an allegorical quality, in that they refer to fundamental and universal phenomena of human life. While Pirosmani’s art radiates spirituality, it also documents and bears testimony to a country at the intersection of the West and the East, and a city, Tbilisi, at the time celebrated as a “Paris of the East”.

Human and animal figures are depicted with tenderness and dignity—and with no shortage of humour. Endowed with great sensitivity, Pirosmani created iconic images of rare expressive power. In paintings of brilliant simplicity and elegant sincerity, he proved himself a master of reduction to essentials. People and animals often look out at the viewer in a manner both insistent and detached. Of glowing intensity, they appear picture-filling, set against a black background with which they nonetheless remain connected at all times. Thereby unfolding a gripping presence in a timeless seeming space. Almost all of Pirosmani’s works share a harmonious stillness, which underscores their spiritual dimension. In a modern age marked by change, Pirosmani created pictures in which his fellow countrymen and countrywomen could recognise the familiar environment of their lives, while the avant-garde discovered in them a radical form of painting.

Despite numerous scholarly endeavours and many myth-making tales and testimonials, very little is known about Pirosmani’s pictures, their meaning, their inspirations, their models, their commissioners and buyers, or the date and place of their production. Pirosmani’s work manifests an existence whose humaneness is as universal as it is supernatural, yet his artistic views and intentions have eluded us to an extent rarely encountered among distinguished 20th-century artists.

Fantastical stories about Niko Pirosmani abound, yet only very few facts are known and established. Born to a peasant family and orphaned at a young age, he left his native province of Kakheti in 1870 for the capital Tbilisi, where he lived with a wealthy family and received some education. He taught himself to paint, trained as a typesetter, worked for the Transcaucasus Railway, ran a dairy, and painted signboards and portraits for commission. In 1912, poet Mikhail Le Dentu and avant-garde artists Kirill and Ilya Zdanevich discovered Pirosmani’s pictures in the taverns of Tbilisi, then at the heart of the bustling city’s cultural life. The Zdanevich brothers enthusiastically began collecting the works of the self-taught painter and supporting him. Le Dentu called him the “Georgian Giotto”. As early as 1913, Pirosmani’s pictures were shown alongside works by Marc Chagall, Natalia Goncharova and Kazimir Malevich in the influential exhibition “Target” in Moscow. Despite his lack of academic artistic training, in 1916 he was invited to join the Society of Georgian Artists, which he however soon turned his back on. He lived as a vagabond bohemian, haunting the taverns of Tbilisi, unable or unwilling to integrate into society. Impoverished, Niko Pirosmani died around 1918. The precise location of his grave is unknown. Many of his works were lost, others were seized by the State following the annexation of Georgia by the Soviet Union. Only a few years after his death, avant-garde artists and writers published articles and books on Pirosmani, researched his life and poured over his art. Over the following decades, he became the object of exhibitions, books and films. An exhibition of his work in Paris fell victim to the outbreak of World War I, finally taking place only in 1969. In 1972, Pablo Picasso produced an etching for a publication about his work. Pirosmani was often misleadingly called the “Rousseau of the East”, sometimes questionably labelled a “modern primitive” or— in the tradition of the narrative surrounding van Gogh—either disparaged as a mad loner or glorified as an unrecognised genius. Today, Pirosmani is Georgia’s most popular artist and he counts fervent enthusiasts in artistic circles worldwide, among them Georg Baselitz, Peter Doig and others.

Pirosmani’s work was first shown in Switzerland in 1995 at the Kunsthaus Zürich in the exhibition “Zeichen & Wunder. Niko Pirosmani und die Gegenwartskunst”. Conceived by Swiss curator Bice Curiger, the show presented Pirosmani alongside contemporary artists. Curiger also curated the 2019 exhibition “Niko Pirosmani – Wanderer between Worlds” at the Fondation Vincent van Gogh Arles, which travelled on to the Albertina in Vienna in slightly modified form.

The Fondation Beyeler is publishing a comprehensive catalogue with Hatje Cantz Verlag, edited by guest curator Daniel Baumann. It brings together essays by Georgian experts Mariam Dvali, Irine Jorjadze, Nana Kipiani and Ana Shanshiashvili as well as two statements by Georgian artists Thea Djordjadze and Andro Wekua. It further features the first translations into German of historical source texts by Georgian writers and artists Grigol Robakidze, Demna Shengelaia and Kirill Zdanevich. The exhibition and the catalogue aim to compile images and facts, and to shine a light on Pirosmani’s art without engaging in speculative, mythologising interpretations. The historical context in which the works were produced, in the thriving Caucasian capital of Tbilisi around 1900, will also be presented. Ahead of the exhibition, all the paintings on display have been examined and prepared for the exhibition by the Fondation Beyeler’s conservation team and their Georgian colleagues.

The exhibition is organised by the Fondation Beyeler and the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Denmark. It is a cooperation with the Georgian National Museum and the Ministry of Culture, Sport and Youth of Georgia, with friendly support of the Infinitart Foundation.

“Niko Pirosmani” is curated by guest curator Daniel Baumann and was developed together with Sam Keller, Director of the Fondation Beyeler, and Irakliy Purtskhvanidze, advisor to the Fondation Beyeler in Georgia, and coordinated by Regula Moser, Associate Curator at the Fondation Beyeler as project manager.

The Fondation Beyeler in Riehen near Basel is internationally renowned for its high-calibre exhibitions, its outstanding collection of modern and contemporary art, as well as its ambitious schedule of events. The museum building was designed by Renzo Piano in the idyllic setting of a park with venerable trees and water lily ponds. It boasts a unique location in the heart of a local recreation area, looking out onto fields, pastures and vineyards close to the foothills of the Black Forest. In collaboration with Swiss architect Peter Zumthor, the Fondation Beyeler is constructing a new museum building in the adjoining park, thus further enhancing the harmonious interplay of art, architecture and nature.

Fondation Beyele
Niko Pirosmani
September 17th, 2023 – January 28th, 2024