Zurab Tsereteli was born in Tbilisi on the 4th of January, 1934. As a child he took a great interest in drawing and painting, encouraged by his uncle – the artist Giorgi Nizharadze. Following this passion, after school, in 1952, he enrolled in the Painting Department of the Tbilisi State Academy of Arts, graduating in 1958, the year of his marriage to Inessa Andronikashvili. In 1960-1963, Tsereteli worked as a staff artist at the Institute of History, Ethnography and Archaeology of the Georgian Academy of Sciences, travelling all over the republic as part of research expeditions, discovering its ancient monuments, its folk-art tradition and its rich material culture. Expanding the range of his creative possibilities,