Onufri to announce winner

After having their works on display for more than one month, the winner of the 18th edition of the Onufri visual arts competition will be announced in a few days. The National Arts Gallery which is hosting the exhibition says the winner will be announced in a ceremony on Feb. 1 by an international jury. Shkelzen Maliqi, a Kosovo philosopher and art critic,
Sandra Pusterhofer, assistant curator in London’s David Roberts Art Foundation and Gentian Shkurti, an Albanian artist, are the three members of the jury.
This year’s exhibition of the Onufri Competition, ‘The Painting of Modern Life’, open since December 22, 2011 at the Temporary Exhibitions’ Wing of the National Gallery in Tirana has been named after Charles Baudelaire’s essay published in 1863 in Paris. According to curator Alban Hajdinaj, “the exhibition is an attempt to build a vantage point on Albanian art, drawn from the concept of modernity. The exhibition is named after Onufri, Albania’s 16th century most important icon painter whose works are on display at the iconographic museum in the southern town of Berat, a UNESCO World Heritage site since 2008. In many of its previous editions, Onufri was held as international exhibition bringing together artists from all over the world.