TIRANA, July 12 – A stone sculpture by Albania’s internationally renowned artist, late Ibrahim Kodra, has been placed in Tirana’s central square in front of the country’s central bank.
Speaking at the inauguration ceremony, outgoing Tirana Mayor Lulzim Basha described Kodra’s “Life Stone” monument as a new art landmark in Tirana, radiating the late cubist painter’s mystic beauty and powerful art messages.
Rubens Shima, an art critic and former director of the National Gallery of Arts, said the monument which Kodra created in the early 1960s “is a totem or idol which a mixture of a robot and idolatry, featuring the artist’s viewpoint on the western society of that time.”
“The sculpture we are inaugurating today is nothing, but the artist’s alter ego, his distant memories, the exploration of a fantastic land such as Albania,” said Shima.
“The sculpture was under possession by an Albanian collector who has two of Kodra’s sculptures in his private collection,” says Ardian Isufi, an Albanian contemporary artist who describes Kodra as “the beginning of a new civilization in Albania.”
Back in 2012, sixty original paintings by Ibrahim Kodra were displayed at the National Gallery of Arts in Tirana in one of the most special events commemorating Albania’s 100th independence anniversary. Named “Albania Fantastica” after a cubist painting Kodra created in 1997, the exhibition featured works in different techniques and genres created from 1940 to 2006.
Albanian post-cubist painter Ibrahim Kodra spent his adult life in Italy’s Milan. His collection includes some 6,000 pieces of art. He was widely admired not only among Albanians and Italians for his modern abstractionist art, but throughout Europe and worldwide.
Ibrahim Kodra died in his apartment in Milan in February 2007 at the age of 88 but was buried in his birthplace of Ishem, outside Durres, under his will.
