A hundred years of Albanian drawing on display at National Gallery

“There are some 150 drawings where the human spirit, the landscape but also the atmosphere of the time dominate from the end of the 19th century to the early 1990s,” says Artan Shabani, the director of the National Gallery.
TIRANA, Dec. 1 – More than a hundred works from the collection of the National Art Gallery are being displayed in a special exhibition called “100 years of Albanian drawing”.
The exhibition curated by Suzana Varvarica Kuka and the gallery’s director Artan Shabani introduces 152 selected drawings by forty-six 19th and 20th century artists.
“Apart from the sense of nostalgia for this period and the historical images, the exhibition’s atmosphere targets acquainting the Albanian and foreign public with the artists’ beginnings and their creative efforts, the growing Albanian drawing school and documenting the stylistic traces where the realist ones dominate,” the curators say.
“Such an exhibition comes for the first time at the National Arts Gallery where this genre has not been given the appropriate space. There are some 150 drawings where the human spirit, the landscape but also the atmosphere of the time dominate from the end of the 19th century to the early 1990s,” said Artan Shabani, the director of the National Gallery.
Curator Suzana Varvarica Kuka said the gallery’s collection comprises 300 drawing works in different techniques including great artists such as Idromeno, Kodra, Shijaku, Buza etc.
The exhibition’s drawings range from a 1890s sketch by great master Kole Idromeno as the first Albanian drawing artist to close with a model expressive-abstract drawing of the mid 1990s by artist Merita Selimi,
The exhibition which opened this week will remain open until January 5, 2015.
The national collection of visual arts at the Albanian National Arts Gallery ranges from a collection of religious icons from the 13th to the 19th century, works from the National Renaissance and Independence period (1883-1944), the biggest painting and sculpture collection in the country from the socialist realism period (1944-1990), as well as a foreign artists’ pavilion and rotating collections of contemporary national and international art.
The gallery is surrounded by a lovely park, and as a special bonus at the rear of the building there are a few still-defiant Communist-era partisan statues clenching their fists at the sky, as well as imposing statues of Lenin and Stalin.