Natalia de Pita Amirejibi

For more than three decades, Natalia de Pita has worked across painting, monumental mosaic, design, and architectural art. Her practice bridges fine art and public space, combining a painter’s imagination with the discipline of large-scale architectural commissions. Whether working on canvas or creating mosaics measured in hundreds of square metres, she approaches each project as part of a larger cultural narrative — one that connects history, literature, memory, and place.

Natalia gravitated towards painting at a very early age. (“The only other thing I ever dreamed of becoming was a confectionery clerk.”) By the time she was twelve, her works had already been featured in exhibitions in Georgia, Latvia, and Bulgaria. By the time she received her Master’s degree from the Tbilisi State Academy of Fine Arts, her work had already been exhibited in Mexico, France, Italy, Spain, the United States, and Russia.

Natalia, who has also published her own poetry in Russian, always sought inspiration through literature. Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita became one of the defining influences of her early artistic development. At the age of twelve she produced more than one hundred drawings and paintings inspired by scenes from the novel, several of which were later included in her first international exhibitions.

The late 1980s and early 1990s were a time of profound upheaval. Georgia gained its independence as the Soviet Union disintegrated, but the country was torn apart by civil war, secessionist conflicts, and economic collapse. Almost everyone in Georgia knew someone who had been killed, injured, or displaced—including Natalia, who lost several close friends during those years.

“You don’t live through those kinds of upheavals without them leaving a deep imprint on your psyche,” she says.

Those experiences found expression in Natalia’s paintings and graphic works of the period, many of which conveyed a powerful sense of displacement and inner uncertainty. Like many artists of her generation, she sought new opportunities abroad. In 1995, while Georgia was still struggling through the aftermath of conflict, she was invited to the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris.

“Paris was like a blood transfusion for me,” Natalia recalls. “It gave me distance from everything that had happened at home, but it also transformed the way I experienced the world.”

Throughout the mid-1990s Natalia divided her time between Paris, Georgia, and St. Petersburg. She studied Interior Design at Créapole in Paris before continuing her education at the Sorbonne, where she earned a Licence in Contemporary Arts and Sciences (Université Paris I Panthéon-Sorbonne).

Among the writers who have shaped her artistic worldview, Jorge Luis Borges occupies a special place. His multilayered narratives, reflections on memory, identity, and infinite realities resonate deeply with Natalia’s own understanding of artistic creation.

“The artist is both the author and a participant,” she says. “A work of art is like a book—it is never truly finished.”

During 1998–1999 Natalia returned to the Cité Internationale des Arts as an Artist in Residence and collaborated closely with the renowned Ukrainian émigré painter Sergei Chepik, whose monumental works include commissions for London’s St. Paul’s Cathedral.

In 2001 Natalia moved to Switzerland, where she established Galerie Lepic in Lausanne. Alongside exhibiting her own paintings, the gallery introduced Swiss audiences to a number of contemporary European artists who had previously remained little known there.

A decisive turning point in Natalia’s career came in 2007, when she was invited to participate in the creation of Georgia’s new Presidential Palace. Over the following two years she devoted herself to the largest and most ambitious project of her professional life to that point: A Walk Through History, a monumental mosaic programme for the palace’s façade and ceremonial courtyard. Natalia conceived the project’s entire thematic narrative and produced an extensive series of oil paintings that later served as the basis for the mosaics, executed in collaboration with the renowned Venetian workshop Travisanutto Mosaici.

In 2010 Natalia completed the monumental Piazza mosaic floor in Batumi, covering 106 square metres in the form of a richly ornamented marble medallion. Combining figurative imagery with elaborate decorative motifs, the work remains the largest figurative marble mosaic in Europe.

At the same time Natalia continued working in architectural and interior design, completing a number of private residential commissions in Georgia. In 2012 she realised another major public project in Batumi, creating two monumental mosaic façades in close collaboration with Travisanutto Mosaici. One of these works, located on Europe Square, was subsequently granted the official status of a Cultural Heritage Monument of Georgia, making it one of the very few contemporary monumental mosaics in the country to receive national heritage protection during the lifetime of its author.

Alongside her architectural projects, Natalia’s intellectual interests increasingly turned towards philosophy, symbolism, and esoteric thought, particularly the writings of G. I. Gurdjieff, C. G. Jung, and Helena Blavatsky. These explorations informed a number of collaborative artistic projects, including one created together with Georgian artists Oleg Timchenko and Gia Bughadze, presented by GeoAir at the Venice Biennale in the Palazzo Zenobio as a collateral event.

In 2019 Natalia co-founded the Ribirabo Foundation together with Irina Koçak (Turkey) and Lusine Bardon (France). The foundation is dedicated to the preservation, study, and contemporary development of Georgian monumental mosaics, applied arts, and design. Alongside her own artistic practice, Natalia has become actively involved in documenting, researching, and conserving Georgia’s twentieth-century mosaic heritage, combining artistic creation with cultural preservation.

Today Natalia de Pita lives and works in Tbilisi, Georgia. Her practice continues to move freely between painting, monumental mosaic, conservation, architectural projects, and design. Throughout these diverse fields, one idea remains constant: the conviction that art should not merely decorate space, but deepen our understanding of history, culture, and the human imagination.