About the Artist
Born on the Black Sea coast. Raised between mountains, water, and the smell of oil paint his father's studio was the first world he knew. In 1992, war took that world away.
He fled with his family to Tbilisi, studied at the Academy of Art, spent time in a monastery searching for what he wanted to say before he said it. Then he packed his canvases into a van and drove toward Europe.
Since 2003 he has lived and worked in Bergen, Northern Holland a village behind the dunes of the North Sea coast, where the light is nothing like Sukhumi and everything like home.
The Work
He paints from memory. Not because he cannot see what is in front of him but because what stays with us is always more honest than what we observe.
His work has been exhibited across Europe from intimate gallery spaces to grand institutions. Each painting leaves the studio once.
Abstract or figurative, precise or wild, large or intimate the subject is always the same: the tension between what was and what is. Between the visible and the things that refuse to disappear.
Making art, celebrating life, living in freedom.
That is the work. That is the life.
On the Wall Across Europe
Giorgi Shengelia is an internationally exhibited expressionist painter whose original oil paintings have been shown in galleries across Europe. With a career spanning three decades, his large-format abstract expressionist works have attracted collectors, curators, and art institutions from the Netherlands to Germany, Belgium and beyond.
Sukhumi: The Lost Coast
Born by the Black Sea, the early years were painted in vibrant, humid light the kind that soaks into a child and never fully leaves.
That coast is gone now. Unreachable. Not by distance but by history.
Its light remains. Not in photographs. In every canvas Giorgi has painted since.
Some people spend their lives looking for the light they lost. Giorgi learned to paint with it.
Northern Light
Amsterdam. Bergen. A different kind of silence.
No humidity. No chaos. No Black Sea at the door. Just light cool, honest, unforgiving.
The North didn't replace what was lost. It clarified it. The way cold water clarifies the mind.
Two worlds now live inside every painting the warmth he was born into, and the silence that taught him to listen.
