TIRANA, Sept. 10 – Albania’s veteran painter Maks Velo, who was imprisoned under communism for his modernist tendencies, has opened a solo retrospective exhibition at the National Art Gallery in Tirana featuring 50 years of creativity.
“The exhibition strives to make public not only the works by artist Maks Velo whose paintings are created in the techniques of oil on canvas, acrylic, graph and his drawings and sculptures, but also suggests to the public through the artworks to discover the rhythm of creation, the influences on creation and the transformations and the artist’s ordeal from one genre to another and the different techniques,” says curator Suzana Varvarica Kuka.
The artworks which will be on display from September 10 to October 4 clearly demonstrate the pressure on the artist during the different periods Albania went through.
Velo, 80, is an Albanian painter and writer born in Paris to Albanian parents from the Korà§a region. He graduated from the Faculty of Construction in Tirana in 1958 and turned to architecture and drawing. His career as a leading Albanian painter was interrupted when he was denounced by name at the party’s fourth congress in 1973 for modernistic tendencies in his painting, that is, for having created works of art allegedly inspired by Amedeo Modigliani, Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso in contradiction to the teachings of socialist realism. He was arrested in October, 1978 and sentenced in 1979 to 10 years in prison. Some 246 of his paintings and all of his art collections were confiscated and destroyed. Velo himself was dispatched to the infamous copper mines of Spaৠand was released in January 1986 when he was allowed to work as a manual laborer until the end of the dictatorship. He has exhibited his works in Albania, France, Poland and the United States. His short stories have also appeared in French translation.
