BIOGRAPHY

“Thengis Rioni’s paintings reveal a deeply humanistic vision — his figures emerge from quiet fields of color like memories resurfacing from time itself. In his work, realism and abstraction merge into a poetic language that speaks of origin, identity, and transcendence.”

Thengis Rioni was born in 1967 in Kutaisi, Georgia. He graduated from the State Academy of Arts in Tbilisi in 1994 and has lived and worked in Berlin, Germany, for more than twenty-five years.

Rioni chose his artist name after the village of Rioni near Kutaisi and the river of the same name, which flows from the Georgian mountains to the Black Sea. This dual reference — to place and to flow — mirrors his artistic path: grounded in his homeland yet continuously moving toward new expressive forms.

His paintings combine modern realism with abstract and planar compositions, exploring the psychological and spiritual depth of the human experience. 
Rioni’s preferred subjects — portraits of women, children, and families — become meditations on memory, emotion, and belonging. 
The artist’s palette, dominated by subtle mixtures of red, white, and blue, and anchored by his signature black, creates luminous fields in which the brushstroke nearly dissolves. 
The result is a haunting balance between presence and disappearance.

Rioni’s work has been exhibited widely throughout Europe and the United States, including at the Galerie Friedmann-Hahn (Berlin), Plexus Gallery (Montreux), and Galeria Makowski (New York).
His paintings have also been presented at numerous Affordable Art Fairs across Europe and in institutions such as the Jewish Synagogue Berlin and the National Gallery of Georgia in Tbilisi and Kutaisi.