""Lela"" Painting

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Besik Arbolishvili's imaginative work is distinguished by an expressive visual language that merges figuration, symbolic narrative, and atmospheric landscape. Born in the Kakheti region to the painter Mikhail Arbolishvili who was the artist’s first teacher, Besik received his formal training at the Tbilisi State Academy of Arts (1974–1981) under leading Georgian artist Ucha Malakevich Chaparidze (Ucha Japaridze), and at the Union Academy Creative Studio (1983–1986). Since the mid-1980s, Besik has exhibited extensively in Georgia, Germany, France, the United States, Kuwait, and Azerbaijan, with select exhibitions at the National Gallery in Tbilisi, the Museum of Modern Art and the Central House of Artists, Emory University in Atlanta, as well as the International Monetary Fund in Washington, D.C. His work has also been featured at the Alla Rogers Gallery in Washington, D.C. and Phillips, New York. In 1998, the Arbolishvili served as a visiting artist as the Virginia Commonwealth University.

Besik’s paintings are represented in institutional collections including the National Gallery of Georgia, the Georgian National Museum, the Museum of Modern Art, the Museum of Contemporary Art , the Museum of Oriental Art, the Otto Pankok Museum in Germany, and the U.S. Embassy in Tbilisi. His work was recently selected for a global visual-arts collaboration with Samsung. Today, Besik Arbolishvili lives and works in Georgia.

While both an expression of subjective reverie and enigmatic narrative, Besik’s practice reflects key themes in Georgian modern and contemporary art, integrating Symbolist imagery, European modernist influences, and the atmospheric, introspective tendencies that emerged during the late Soviet and Perestroika periods. His style is highly original and yet clearly situated within this broader Georgian trajectory, combining expressive figuration with local cultural and spiritual sensibilities to merge national identity with international modernist forms. Of his process the artist shares: “Do I plan a painting in advance? No — my entire life plans it for me. I simply try to channel all the information that surrounds me, and it remains on the canvas. My most successful works are created in such a way that I do not even remember the process of creation.