Nina Gamsakhurdia-Bardavelidze is a Georgian artist and art historian who has lived and worked in Basel, Switzerland, since 1992.
Educated at the Tbilisi State Academy of Arts, she deepened her knowledge of medieval monumental painting and Byzantine iconography while also studying restoration techniques. This foundation became central to her later artistic and scholarly work. After graduation, she worked at the Institute of Art History in Tbilisi.
In Switzerland, Gamsakhurdia became an active figure in the field of icon restoration, collaborating with both private collectors and museums. Between 2000 and 2002 she restored a major collection of icons that laid the foundation for the Burgbalden Icon Museum in Lincenburg — the first and only museum in Switzerland dedicated entirely to icon painting, inaugurated under her curatorship.
Her artistic vision imbues materials with a living force. Like the old masters, she prepares her own pigments from semi-precious stones and paints on panels of lime, elm, or cherry wood, covered with organic gesso.
For her, color is not simply an aesthetic choice but a bearer of symbolic and energetic resonance. This is why her works — whether relief abstractions or Mandylions (a series of portraits inspired by the Image of Edessa) — establish both visible and invisible connections with the viewer.
Among her outstanding works are:
- “Blue Column” (Lapis Solaris) — a stele created for the Station Church in Zurich, later permanently installed in the Tituskirche in Basel.
- “Eve, Mother, Earth” — a work deeply tied to the artist’s personal history and dedicated to the memory of her mother.
Alongside her artistic practice, Nino Gamsakhurdia actively shares her expertise, teaching painting and restoration techniques developed through her own practice, delivering lectures, and initiating interdisciplinary curatorial projects.
In 2018 she founded ICONARIUM.ORG, an association devoted to the preservation and archiving of Christian artifacts in Switzerland.
Her work unites the precision of a scholar with the intuition of an artist, merging technique and symbolism so that color and matter are transformed into living energy reaching the viewer.
Sources:
- nina-gamsachurdia.ch
- tsu.ge
- ეროვნული ბიბლიოთეკის არქივი
- Ketevan Kintsurashvili. Nina Gamsakhurdia, the Artist (Curatorial text for Velum, the solo exhibition of Nina Gamsakhurdia at the Georgian National Gallery in 2025)
