Pots and Plants Painting

There’s something foreign in artist Nino Narimanidze’s work—a hint of something so obscure and grandiose and out of reach. It’s in the sand dunes encompassing crumbling, tired buildings of Sinai, in the bewildered, crashing waves of the Black Sea and even in the bucolic, winding alleys of Batumi. You’ll find it in her still life paintings, too. In the ordinary things—say, in the stillness of a paper-white cup of tea sitting on a bed of crumpled red tablecloth symbolizing the calm before the storm of the Arab Spring, of which she was a quiet witness during her 16 years of living in Egypt. Suffice to say, the Georgian-born artist has seen enough of life to outlast a dozen aluminum tubes of oils and twice as many sets of watercolor. She shares, through her landscapes, still lifes and portraits, glimpses of memories formed throughout her years living in the heart of Caucasus and the belly of the Middle East. And although these moments captured on canvas may seem like that of lands far away, they are certainly anything but unexplored. Nino Narimanidze received an MFA from the Art Academy in Tbilisi Republic of Georgia in 1982 and studied at the Moscow State University of Ivan Fedorov in Russia. She then worked professionally as a book designer at “Merani” and “Khelovneba” publishing houses in Tbilisi, producing more than 200 illustrations for locally and internationally renowned authors. Throughout her more-than-35 years of experience in the art sphere, Nino’s work has graced the halls of galleries around the world including Turkey, Russia, Bulgaria, Egypt and United Arab Emirates. She’s proud of her accomplishments as an artist, and even more so as a teacher and mentor of a young generation of artists, previously in Egypt and currently in the United States.