The exhibition displays works that show the influences and the dialogue of Shima with the western modernist painting and its main artists during the communist period
TIRANA, April 25 – “Small territories of Freedom” is bringing back internationally renowned Albanian painter Alush Shima in an exhibition focusing on his early career in the early 1970s during the communist regime when he secretly painted what would have cost him his life. The exhibition opening on Friday, April 26 at the National Gallery of Arts in Tirana is curated by Italy’s Arturo Calzona and Vanja Strukelj who have focused in the early years of the artist’s work from 1968 to 1973, which they consider of double importance. “First, during those years the Albanian culture experienced for a short time a relative freedom to experiment. Secondly, these are the years of Shima’s artistic shaping,” says the National Gallery.
The exhibition displays works that show the influences and the dialogue of Shima with the western modernist painting and its main artists. According to critics Strukelj e Calzona, who take into consideration first the grounded academic shaping of the artist, Shima builds his identity in comparison with the masters of the past, especially in close relationship with the work of Braque and Matisse, whose paintings become a territory to be explored for the artist.
The painting of Alush Shima is a synthesis of the modernist approach with his individual and familiar world. During the communist years, Shima worked almost in complete privacy, developing his work and style away from the prying eyes, showing very little. The works in this exhibition are quite important for they come for the first time to the public, displaying a very interesting and hidden micro-world that existed within the stern cultural world of the socialist Albania.
“In those years I could not find anything from my work, because I did not agree with the way painting was represented, how it served the system, and in a way, I withdrew. When the system fell, I shook off the stress and wished to paint nature, light in the coming years. I believe that I got what I wanted from my work,” says 70-year-old Shima who has participated in dozens of exhibitions around the world especially in the United Kingdom and the United States.
“Painting has been the aim of my life. I have mainly referred to scenery and still nature. Even today, these are the themes I prefer the most. There is no single painting not having a thought, a message in it. Sometimes, beauty is seen as a look. To me, the essence of the art is in its beauty,” said Shima in an earlier interview.
Alush Shima’s most perilous moment was in 1973, when the Sigurimi secret police seized his closest friend, fellow artist Ali Oseku, for letting slip praise of such bourgeois painters as Picasso and Matisse. “I was terrified he would talk about me. I knew they would torture him,” said Shima. He rushed home to destroy every trace of his dissident activity: 150 paintings, the work of nine years, were torn to pieces and set alight, says Huckleberry Fine Art Gallery in Washington where Shima has exhibited his work
In December 2012 Alushi was decorated by the President of the Republic with the Great Master Order as a “virtuoso painter who rebuilt through oil in canvass his visual reality unveiling to the whole world the reality of a quite different Albania from that of the socialist realism.”
The “Small territories of Freedom” exhibition will remain open at the National Gallery of Arts in Tirana from April 26 to May 27.
