Irakli Parjiani is one of the greatest representatives of 20^th century Georgian art, and leader of post-Soviet Georgian painting since the 1970s, having defined the position, style, and direction of the generation. With regard to Georgian art, he is associated with the rehabilitation and transformation of the interrupted tradition of religious painting. All currents, motifs, themes, characters or systems of symbols in his works ultimately merge into religious paintings, forming the specific direction and independent model of his own creative world. He introduced his own scheme of abstraction and shape modification to Georgian painting during this period. Parjiani was a unifier of traditional and modern cultural systems, a bearer of hidden universal knowledge, a “traveler” through metaphysical landscapes, an interpreter of the eternal themes of life and death, of symbols and dreams. Within the critical period of the 1980s, he managed to create a universe that was full of hidden tragedies, mysticism, the inevitability of vanity and, at the same time, a festive celebration of life – those categories of light and beauty that are always associated with eternal values.

Baia Tsikoridze