Selected Works
A collection of recent paintings by Tea Montelli — portraits and scenes that explore the quiet feeling of everyday life. Working primarily in oil and acrylic on canvas, Montelli captures her subjects with warmth and psychological depth: a woman lost in thought, an elder caught in a moment of clarity, a child running down a sun-drenched hallway. Each piece balances intimate observation, finding the extraordinary in the familiar.
Aside from portraits, selected works showcase three works from abstract, still life and soviet series that mark a convergence in Montelli’s practice between place, memory, and material gesture. In A Free Flow (abstract), pigment moves with an almost musical logic, the composition resisting fixed form in favor of continuous becoming. Purple Coast (still life) fixes a fleeting atmospheric moment on the Calabrian coast, the saturated violet light of dusk carrying both topographical specificity and emotional residue. Chulani Room (soviet series) turns inward: a reconstruction of intimate, masculine ritual in Soviet Georgia — wine, conversation, the crackle of a gramophone — rendered with a warm restraint that allows the space itself to carry its own biography. Taken together, the three works demonstrate Montelli’s command of scale in feeling: the monumental held inside the small, continuum held inside the momentum.
In a yellow hallway hung with paintings, a girl talks on the phone while a child runs toward her from the far end — a scene of domestic life rendered with warmth, depth, and a painter’s eye for what lives on walls.
Poised between innocence and introspection, Anna emerges from a quiet world of color and memory. Her striped dress becomes a rhythm of light and shadow, while her gaze invites the viewer into a moment that feels both familiar and dreamlike. Through simplicity and subtle emotion, the portrait captures the delicate space where reality and imagination meet.
A woman reclines in a grey armchair, her cheek resting gently in her hand, wrapped in a sweep of cobalt blue. Her quiet smile and dark eyes carry a warmth that feels both intimate and timeless, set against a layered blue and ochre background.
Started while playing with oil colours with her niece, Chiara, who the artist painted several times following New Year’s Eve. Montelli shows her fascination with Rembrandt and reimagines how he would look if she were to paint him — if she were to have that luxury and honour.
Deda (Deda means mother in Georgian) gazes out with calm, green-eyed clarity — her soft white hair rendered with tender attention, set against a vibrant backdrop of abstract paintings full of colour and life.
He has seen the sea walk under his feet and the dead rise like bread. Now he smiles — not at God, not at men, but at the beautiful, foolish weight of it all. The eyes carry centuries. The hands have held miracles the way you hold water — briefly, humbly, knowing it will go. This is what power looks like when it no longer needs to prove itself.
He sits with the particular stillness of a man who has stopped fighting time. Behind him, three wheels hang on the wall — turning, always turning, yet fixed there in the plaster, which is perhaps the only honest thing about them. He knows this. And in the foreground, barely there, a girl’s face surfaces from the noise of the room — catching the same feeling, the same quiet vertigo of an evening that will end and an hour that will not. The osteria holds them both: the pensive and the fleeting, the ancient and the young, equally mortal, equally at home.
Viviana smiles gently in front of a bright wall of books, her brown eyes warm and knowing — a portrait alive with colour, intelligence, and ease.
Against a glowing magenta ground, Professoressa Golotta turns with a knowing smile — a portrait of warmth, intelligence, and quiet presence.
Soviet Series
A tiny room — part wine cellar, part sanctuary. Three men, an improvised table, and a gramophone playing Soviet vinyls and Georgian folk songs.
Still Life / Still Nature
The mountain at the soft light of sunrise shows itself with its curves and unexpected flows — form emerging slowly from shadow, colour shifting with the breath of morning.
Abstracts
Colour and form in conversation — layers of paint building a world that speaks before it explains itself.