Edited by Bice Curiger, Klaus Albrecht Schröder, Adrian Ciprian Barsan. Text by Tadao Ando, Friedrich Teja Bach, Adrian Ciprian Barsan, Gottfried Boehm, Bice Curiger, Mariam Dvali, Régis Gayraud, David Lordkipanidze.
Works from the self-taught forgotten hero of the Russian avant-garde
The Georgian “naive” painter Niko Pirosmani, sometimes known as Nikala (1862–1918), is long overdue for rediscovery. Today, this autodidact, who painted his pictures of animals and people for inns and pubs, is admired as a leading representative of “naive” art, but the story of his original critical reception is remarkable. Hardly known outside of Georgia these days, his work was nevertheless displayed alongside works by Natalia Goncharova, Mikhail Larionov, Kazimir Malevich and Marc Chagall in the legendary 1913 exhibition Mischén (Target) in Moscow, where he was known as the “Rousseau of the East.”
Pirosmani devised a unique visual vocabulary—black background, elementary colors of red, blue, yellow, green and white—to create his paintings of animals and portraits of merchants, shopkeepers, workmen and noblemen. This book, published for the Albertina’s major Pirosmani retrospective, examines his paintings in the context of art history.
"Arsenal at Night" is reproduced from 'Niko Pirosmani.'
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"Roebuk and Landscape" (1913) is reproduced from Niko Pirosmani,Hatje Cantz's fascinating new monograph on the "vagrant autodidact," sometime railroad brakeman and dairy farmer who eked out a living painting signs for stores and taverns in Russian Georgia during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. "For Pirosmani, art was a wide-open field," Bice Curiger writes. "He was an outsider—a vagabond, as they say—who deliberately chose moving about as a way of life. He was a wanderer between city and countryside, between inns and stables, who at the same time resided in the center of community events. Indeed, Pirsmani located his commissioned works in society, literally in media res, in almost allegorical places that embody conviviality and open exchange, in inns, taverns, bars and stores—not in the symbolic interstice of galleries, artists' associations and museums. From earliest childhood, Pirosmani was influenced by personal blows of fate, but also by the experience of failure and the inability to integrate into a regular professional life. For him, art—painting—was emancipation." continue to blog
FORMAT: Hbk, 11.25 x 9.5 in. / 220 pgs / 130 color. LIST PRICE: U.S. $65.00 LIST PRICE: CANADA $90 ISBN: 9783775744751 PUBLISHER: Hatje Cantz AVAILABLE: 2/19/2019 DISTRIBUTION: D.A.P. RETAILER DISC: TRADE PUBLISHING STATUS: Active AVAILABILITY: Out of stock TERRITORY: NA LA
Published by Hatje Cantz. Edited by Bice Curiger, Klaus Albrecht Schröder, Adrian Ciprian Barsan. Text by Tadao Ando, Friedrich Teja Bach, Adrian Ciprian Barsan, Gottfried Boehm, Bice Curiger, Mariam Dvali, Régis Gayraud, David Lordkipanidze.
Works from the self-taught forgotten hero of the Russian avant-garde
The Georgian “naive” painter Niko Pirosmani, sometimes known as Nikala (1862–1918), is long overdue for rediscovery. Today, this autodidact, who painted his pictures of animals and people for inns and pubs, is admired as a leading representative of “naive” art, but the story of his original critical reception is remarkable. Hardly known outside of Georgia these days, his work was nevertheless displayed alongside works by Natalia Goncharova, Mikhail Larionov, Kazimir Malevich and Marc Chagall in the legendary 1913 exhibition Mischén (Target) in Moscow, where he was known as the “Rousseau of the East.”
Pirosmani devised a unique visual vocabulary—black background, elementary colors of red, blue, yellow, green and white—to create his paintings of animals and portraits of merchants, shopkeepers, workmen and noblemen. This book, published for the Albertina’s major Pirosmani retrospective, examines his paintings in the context of art history.
