Orion Shima in “Counter-Landscape”

TIRANA, March 7 – A number of works produced in recent years, mainly acrylic paintings and works on paper, displaying the trajectory of his latest artistic research are featured in Orion Shima’s “Counter-landscape” exhibition which has opened at the National Gallery of Art in Tirana. The exhibition inaugurated on March 7 will run until April 8, 2012.
“Orion Shima’s recent paintings are a free, sensitive and profound expression of a melancholy and nostalgic interpretation of nature that seem to stem from memories, experiences and adolescent reveries. At the same time, metaphorically, it can be seen as a refined contemplation on the proper nature of painting as an irreplaceable language, something that generates a personal and genuinely poetic vision of universal value,” says Francesco Poli, the Italian curator of the exhibition about Shima’s latest works
Orion Shima was one of the five artists Albania selected to participate in the 54th International Art Exhibition of the Venice Biennale held from June, 4th to November, 27th 2011.
Shima was represented in the exhibit with three paintings. “They are works without social impacts. In my opinion, art should not be contaminated by the outer social and political circumstances. I see it detached from them. I am interested in the emotion caused by art itself,” says Shima.
Albania’s participants, young artists Anila Rubiku, Orion Shima, Gentian Shkurti, Eltjon Valli and Driant Zeneli were selected by Italy’s Riccardo Caldura, who was the curator of the Albanian pavilion.
Albania’s exhibition was called Geopathies, which condenses the curatorial idea of identifying a close relationship between the work of art and the geographical, historical and social context.