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Journal Topic
Tbilisi Through the Eyes of Dato Popiashvili
Published July 28, 2026
Tbilisi appears often in Georgian painting as a city of steep streets, layered houses, balconies, river crossings, churches, courtyards, and shifting light. In Dato Popiashvili’s work, the city becomes something more intimate: not only a place to look at, but a place remembered through texture.
Several works presented by Art Gallery Line show Popiashvili returning to Tbilisi as both subject and atmosphere. “Metekhi Bridge“, “Tbilisi Yard“, “Winter in Tbilisi“, and “Winter” are not documentary views. They do not flatten the city into landmark or panorama. Instead, they compress Tbilisi into fragments: a bridge railing, a church form, a steep stair, a courtyard facade, a cluster of roofs, a patch of road, a window lit against snow.
In “Metekhi Bridge“, the city opens across a winter passage. The composition holds together road, bridge, cars, pedestrians, church architecture, and mountains beyond. The surface is active and layered; buildings are not sharply described so much as accumulated through color and line. The city feels mobile, as if the viewer has stopped only briefly before continuing across the bridge.
*Tbilisi Yard* moves inward. Here the city is less public and more domestic: stairs, balconies, rooflines, small lit windows, and an enclosed architectural rhythm. Snow breaks across the red and brown structure of the scene, while dark branches and drawn lines give the courtyard a nervous energy. It is a painting of a place, but also of proximity: the feeling of living with buildings close around you.
Dato Popiashvili
Tbilisi Yard
Medium: Acrylic on canvas Size: 62.5 × 52.5 cm | 24.6 × 20.7 in Year: 2005
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.
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.
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.