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Museum Week in Georgia: Ziga Waliszewski 120 exhibition





The Georgian National Museum’s Shalva Amiranashvili Fine Arts Museum is holding an exhibition of Ziga Waliszewski's artworks during Museum Week dedicated to International Museum Day. The exhibition will be held from 17 May to 12 June 2017.

The exhibition is dedicated to the 120 year anniversary of the artist and will showcase up to 100 paintings from the collections of the Fine Arts Museum. 

Zygmunt (Ziga) Waliszewski (1897-1936) was an artist of Polish origin who lived in Tbilisi, the capital of Georgia. He was an active member of Tbilisi’s modernist artist bloc. At that time, the cultural life of the city was distinguished by its avant-garde interests and longing for innovations. The young generation were looking for new forms and methods of perceiving the world and expressing their own standpoint. 

In 1912-13, Waliszewski, along with Kirill and Ilia Zdanevich, as well as Michael Le Danteau, met great Georgian artist Niko Pirosmanashvili (Pirosmani). The artist's work fascinated young people who determined to collect, save and popularize Pirosmani's artworks. They also assembled a catalogue of his works. 

With the Zdanevich brothers, Lado Gudiashvili, Kolau Cherniyavsky, Yuri Degen and Kara-Darvish, Waliszewski was actively involved in the formation of the "Futurist Syndicate’’ and painted the "Fantastic Coffee House." In 1919, with Albert Zalcmann, he decorated the curtain of the Opera and Ballet Theatre where he depicted ruins, clouds, and a horseman with a red sun. As Waliszewski stated, he aimed to express "man fighting his fate.’’

While working in Tbilisi, Waliszewski mostly created posters, book illustrations, caricatures, grotesque scenes, graphics, portraits, and landscapes. He mainly composed with gauze, pencil, and pastel, and rarely with oil.

Ziga Waliszewski's works can be characterized with expressive spirit, richness, fantasy, irony and a sense of humor as well as an ability to improvise. His talent was equally denoted in big compositions, portraits or stills. Despite living a short life and his severe illness, Ziga Waliszewski left a rich creative legacy. 



















Ziga Waliszewski's view of Tbilisi, 2016


Ziga Waliszewski's view of Tbilisi Town Hall, 2016




Ziga Waliszewski, self-portrait (1915)

Portrait of Ziga Waliszewski by Lado Gudiashvili (1915)



MARTINA NICOLLS is an international aid and development consultant, and the author of:- The Shortness of Life: A Mongolian Lament (2015), Liberia’s Deadest Ends (2012), Bardot’s Comet (2011), Kashmir on a Knife-Edge (2010) and The Sudan Curse (2009).


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