Exhibition featuring late Kosovo painter opens at Arts Gallery

TIRANA, April 5 – Starting from April 6 an exhibition featuring artworks by late Kosovo painter Muslim Mulliqi will be open at the National Arts Gallery in Tirana. The exhibition called “Muslim Mulliqi – Works 1970-1990” has on display 32 artworks created during a 20-year period and will be open to the public until the end of April, gallery officials said in a statement.
This is the first personal exhibition of the artist organized by and hosted by the National Gallery of Arts, and marks an important event for the Albanian art community.
His painting oeuvre stretches over nearly 40 years, beginning in early 1960s and ending in 1998 and it is divided into different cycles, or phases. The themes displayed in it include pastoral legends, heads of northerners, towers, family, and some works from the vortex series; the majority are in the technique of oil on canvas and a few are oil on fibreboard.
Mulliqi’s painting is a figurative expressionist painting. It is a complex expression which combines the contemporary with the folkloric. Although it goes through different stages, his work deals constantly with the surrounding Kosovan environment and landscape, where he grew up and spent his childhood, tending towards an individual – philosophical essence that transcends local territorial backgrounds, searching for the universal and complete freedom of artistic expression, the latter best expressed in the figures he paints in search of “Invasion of new spaces”, as one of his best series is known.
Regarding his own painting, Mulliqi has said: “I want to find a deeper understanding of life, experienced from childhood. For example, what that man, or that woman, who have looked at us behind closed windows while we as children were playing has lived, thought, and felt like. My paintings seek that being that has a rich inner life but feels homesick for sun and space.”
Born in the Kosovo town of Gjakova in 1934, Mulliqi is considered a pioneer of modern art in the Albanian-inhabited lands. He finished the high school of Applied Arts in Pej롩n 1951 and graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Belgrade, in 1959. One of the founders of the Academy of Fine Arts in Prishtina in 1962, he was appointed its first Professor and Dean.
Mulliqi’s exhibition follows that of Gazmend Leka, the winner of the Onufri 2010 visual arts competition, which remained open until March 27. The exhibition featured some 40 paintings mainly in the oil on canvass technique.
Next May will bring another special exhibition at the Arts Gallery featuring artworks of late ethnic Albanian artist from Macedonia Adem Kastrati. The series of Albanian painters will continue in May 2011 with a solo exhibition by modern painter Ali Oseku.
The first half of 2011 agenda will close with a photo exhibition by Martin Parr which is brought to Albania in cooperation with the British Council in Tirana.
Apart from temporary exhibitions, the National Arts Gallery boasts a rich permanent collection. In seven halls, the gallery displays the history of Albanian painting, dating from the end of the 19th century, a period which marks the beginning of secular painting in Albania, to nowadays.