From Darkness to Light — Paintings, Memory and the White Cube in Tbilisi
Eleven new Caucasus paintings at Vernissage Gallery Tbilisi, on the occasion of the publication of the catalog In the Prison of Art — 137 paintings from 30 years in Georgia.
Hans Heiner Buhr
Hans Heiner Buhr is a Berlin-born painter and crypto artist based in Tbilisi, Georgia. He studied art education in Dresden and painting at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam. His large-format expressionist works engage with conflict, power and identity — from post-Soviet landscapes to the digital frontiers of blockchain and NFT culture. His paintings and digital works are held in private collections and on-chain across SuperRare, Foundation, KnownOrigin and the Bitcoin blockchain as Ordinals. He also runs Kaukasus-Reisen, a Tbilisi-based adventure travel agency operating in Georgia and Armenia.
From Darkness to Light – Hans Heiner Buhr | Vernissage Gallery Tbilisi
Hans Heiner Buhr opens From Darkness to Light at Vernissage Gallery Tbilisi on 3 June 2026 — new paintings tracing thirty years between East Berlin and the Caucasus, alongside the first presentation of his catalogue In the Prison of Art.
Aprilgedicht — Eine Skizze von 1989
Eine frühe Zeichnung aus Smolensk von 1988, verbunden mit dem Aprilgedicht vom 20.4.1989 — eine Erinnerung an Aufbruch, Sehnsucht, Wut und die fragile Bildsprache der späten 1980er Jahre.
Meir Reappears
A rediscovered painting opens a door back to Dresden in 1990: Hans Heiner Buhr tells the story of Meir, a portrait of Meir Mendelssohn, created as part of a triptych that helped finance his painting studies at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam.
Meir taucht wieder auf
Ein wiederentdecktes Gemälde öffnet eine Tür in die Dresdner Nachwendezeit: 1990 malte Hans Heiner Buhr das Porträt Meir als Teil eines Triptychons, um sein Studium an der Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam zu finanzieren. 36 Jahre später taucht das Bild unerwartet auf einer Auktion wieder auf.
Desire: Three Caravan Drawings and a Poem
Three recent drawings of caravans and pack horses, accompanied by the poem Desire — a meditation on movement, longing, trade routes, and the imagined landscapes between the Caspian Sea and Isfahan.
The Caravan — now on Saatchi Art
The Caravan is a 2016 oil painting by Hans Heiner Buhr, painted in Tbilisi on two joined canvases. The work shows a rider with pack horses and herd protection dogs — one of the artist’s recurring Caucasus motifs.
Paintings from the Caucasus Now on Saatchi Art
My Saatchi Art profile has been updated with a focused selection of paintings from different periods of my work. Many of them are rooted in Georgia and the Caucasus — in horses, mountain passes, borderlands, memory, conflict and the strange beauty of post-Soviet landscapes.
Otar Chkhartishvili at the Dry Bridge Art Market, Tbilisi, 1998
Rare archive photographs from Tbilisi in 1998: Georgian artist Otar Chkhartishvili (1938 - 2006) and friends at the Dry Bridge art market — a small document of Georgia’s post-Soviet art world, full of improvisation, friendship and belief.
Studio, Arutin-Saiatnova Street 17, Tbilisi, 2012
A 2012 self-portrait in my studio in Old Tbilisi — a room of work, memory, and artistic life.