Soviet Georgian artist Tengiz Mirzashvili 1934-2008
Soviet Georgian artist Tengiz Mirzashvili
Born in 1934 in Mestia, Georgia, Tengiz Revazovich Mirzashvili (10 February 1934 – 1 January 2008) created touching landscapes, beautiful unrealizable women, flowers and birds – everything that surrounded him. Meanwhile, with his tender naivety and purity he reminded Niko Pirosmanishvili, who he looked like.
Honored Artist of Georgian SSR, he graduated from the Academy of Arts in Tbilisi, workshop of SS Kobuladze (1958).
For Mirzashvili’s creativity is characteristic the desire for wholeness and manly asceticism of images. Taken from the everyday world, his characters seem to be in slow motion. The characteristic coloring of the canvas, the stable archaic forms of the pattern resemble ancient frescoes and reliefs. And their imaginative structure manifest an interest in the historical past, folklore inherent in modern man, as a guardian of the primordial artistic culture of the people.
In the painting “Harvesting” (1967), the everyday motif is cleared of everyday life. A female figure, as impressive as a statue, exists in a special, somewhat abstract space. The artist creates a poetic image, which contains permanent human values.
The works of Tengiz Mirzashvili are in the Georgian State Museum of Fine Arts, National Picture Gallery (Tbilisi), The Tretyakov Gallery, Museum of the Arts of the East, Gallery of Omar Chkhaidze (Moscow), and also in private galleries and collections. Besides, according to those who knew him, the artist worked a lot and generously gave out his paintings to new and old friends.