Dimitri Shevardnadze National Gallery
Georgia's principal art gallery on Rustaveli Avenue, known for Pirosmani and Georgian modernism.
The gallery occupies a baroque-revival pavilion set back from Rustaveli Avenue in a small park, built to the designs of Albert Salzmann in the late 1880s to hold a museum of military history. Its pale blue and white front has given rise to the local name Blue Gallery. The painter Dimitri Shevardnadze, who had campaigned for Georgian works to be kept and shown in the country, opened the first art exhibition in the building in 1920, and the gallery later took his name.
The gallery joined the Georgian National Museum in 2007 and was reconstructed to provide eight exhibition rooms together with conservation studios and stores; the two principal halls keep their original glazed roofs. Holdings run to some thirty thousand works, dominated by Georgian painting and sculpture of the twentieth century. Alongside the permanent rooms the gallery mounts a steady programme of retrospectives of Georgian artists and touring exhibitions of foreign art.
Highlights
- Paintings by Niko Pirosmani, the self-taught Georgian master
- Canvases by Lado Gudiashvili and David Kakabadze
- Sculpture by Iakob Nikoladze and his contemporaries
- Top-lit halls under the original glazed roofs
