“Somehow, nothing works for me the way it does for other people. I’m stuck in the throat of this damned life.”

Niko Pirosmani was born in 1862 in the village of Mirzaani in eastern Georgia, the son of two peasants who owned a small vineyard and kept a few animals. When he was about eight years old, his father died, and shortly afterward his mother also passed away. He was then raised by his older sisters before moving to Tbilisi. There, he worked as a shepherd, a railway conductor, and a sign painter while gradually developing his own distinctive visual language.

Pirosmani lived most of his life in poverty, often exchanging his paintings for food, wine, or a place to sleep. Around 1912, avant-garde artists and poets began to discover his work, but recognition came too late. He died alone in Tbilisi in 1918, and no one knows for certain where he was buried. Today, he is regarded as one of Georgia’s most important artists, and his distinctive, intensely expressive paintings have often been compared to those of Henri Rousseau.