Albanian, Kosovo painter featured in New York exhibit

TIRANA, July 16 – Albanian veteran painter Edi Hila and young Kosovo artist Petrit Halilaj are being featured in a collective exhibition in New York bringing together 23 artists of different generations and from diverse geographical areas.
The two Albanian artists take the realities and recent histories of their respective countries as starting points for their work. Hila, now in his seventies, often portrays loaded structures in Tirana – erected in one political and ideological period and erased in another – that bespeak of a desire to forget history exemplifying what was perhaps only a veneer of democracy.
Meanwhile, Petrit Halilaj, explores the remnants of the former Natural History Museum of his native Kosovo, a formerly remarkable place before splintered nationalisms disintegrated Yugoslavia, and turned Halilaj and his family into refugees. His animal sculptures, made out of soil and cow excrement are based on the Museum’s former specimens that were replaced by a nationalistic display of folk traditions.
The Some Artists’ Artists exhibition at the Marian Goodman Gallery will be open until August 22.
Edi Hila was born in Shkod첬 Albania in 1944. Since 1991 he has taught painting at the Tirana Academy of Arts נwhere he has notably educated artists such as Adrian Paci and Anri Sala. He has taken part in numerous international exhibitions including the Venice Biennale (1999). His works have recently been acquired by the collections of the Musꥠd’art Moderne Centre Pompidou, FRAC Pays de la Loire and the Fonds Municipal of the Ville de Paris.
As an important figure of the Balkan arts scene, the work of Edi Hila has for the last 20 years bared witness to the profound changes experienced by societies in post communist Europe. “Having refused to emigrate to a more economically prosperous country, Hila remains living in Tirana where he has developed a practice which reflects on the transitory nature of Albanian history נits geography between east and west and on the position of Albanian painting in Mediterranean art history,” writes the JGM Gallery in Paris about Hila who in early 2014 displayed the Penthouse exhibition at this gallery.
Petrit Halilaj, born in 1986 in Skenderaj, Kosovo, lives and works in Kosovo, Berlin and Mantua. Although still very young, he has already represented his country at the 55th Venice Bienήale (Pavilion of the Republic of Kosovo, 2013), won the Ettore Fico Prize in the last edition of Artissima 2013 and has been involved in an extensive personal exhibition at Wiels Centrum voor Kunst Hedendaagse in Brussels entitled “Poisoned by men in need of some love.”