Tbilisi Through the Eyes of Dato Popiashvili

Published July 28, 2026

In *Winter in Tbilisi*, Popiashvili reduces the city to broad marks and glowing color. Architecture becomes almost abstract: domes, rooftops, arches, and river-like passages are suggested through thick strokes of blue, ochre, red, white, and gray. The painting carries the sensation of the city rather than its exact outline. It is Tbilisi seen through weather, evening, and memory.

The second *Winter* work deepens that mood. Small houses sit under a dark sky, their roofs rounded by snow and their windows lit from within. The palette is quieter, closer to night. Birds or small animals cross the lower edge, giving scale to the scene and making the city feel inhabited even where people are absent. The image is tender without becoming sentimental.

Winter in Tbilisi — Dato Popiashvili — Oil on cardboard — 28 × 36 cm — 2017 — Unique work — Presented by Art Gallery Line

Winter in Tbilisi , Dato Popiashvili, 2017. Oil on cardboard.

Dato Popiashvili

Winter

Year: 2017
Medium: Canvas, Oil
Dimensions: 30.3 × 38.7 cm | 11.9 × 15.2 in
SKU: 10-064

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Across these works, Popiashvili’s Tbilisi is built from contrasts: snow and warm windows, old architecture and moving cars, exterior facades and private interiors, public bridges and enclosed yards. His city is neither idealized nor detached. It is tactile, familiar, and slightly dreamlike.

That quality may connect to Popiashvili’s training in painting restoration. A restorer learns to look at surfaces carefully: to notice layers, damage, repair, color shifts, and what time leaves behind. In his Tbilisi paintings, the city itself seems to be treated as a layered surface. Walls, roofs, roads, and skies carry traces of touch.

For Art Gallery Line, these works offer a compact but powerful way to approach Popiashvili’s practice. They show an artist attentive to Tbilisi not as a symbol alone, but as a lived visual field: a city of passages, thresholds, courtyards, weather, and memory.