“Edi Rama’s state office is also his studio. His illustrated leaves of his memo can be seen as resistance to and liberation from the rigid and standardized structures of his daily official agenda,” says the Michael Schultz gallery
TIRANA, April 27 – Prime Minister Edi Rama, an artist turned politician who was Tirana Mayor for 11 years before he took over as the country’s new head of government in 2013, has taken his drawing exhibition to Berlin after its display in a Paris gallery last December.
“In Berlin, at the prestigious Michael Schultz gallery of modern art where an exhibition with 115 paintings created in years in my office desk opened in the presence of many collectors and art lovers. Two art museums in Germany expressed their interest to display the collection in their premises. A modestly positive contribution even for Albania’s image,” wrote Rama, posting a picture of his latest exhibition.
“Edi Rama’s state office is also his studio. His illustrated leaves of his memo can be seen as resistance to and liberation from the rigid and standardized structures of his daily official agenda,” says the Michael Schultz gallery.
The drawings seem to expand beyond the boundaries of the standard size sheets with their functional linear framework like flowers that break through concrete. Rama’s forms disrupt the constrained space of the DIN A4 norm and capture a time beyond such formal organization – in these forms an imaginative visual present, past and future emerges. In this way Rama integrates art and politics and connects imagination and administration in a manner that unites flowery organic forms with sober, political duties. His solo exhibition ‘Les fleurs du calendrier – calendar flowers’ is showing a selection of these unusual drawings from Edi Rama’s time as a mayor of Tirana.
Edi Rama, who is a visual artist as well as Prime Minister of Albania, knows how to unite these two fundamentally different tasks creatively. “Hence, producing his artistic calendar pages is just as important a part of his daily life as his political documents. In struggling to deal with his immense workload and with the pressing responsibilities of building a new society in his native country Albania, art helps him to communicate.”
He records his daily thoughts and ideas on thousands of calendar pages in colourful abstraction, creating intimate moments. Rama describes the process as an eruption of profoundly interior forces, which he is able to liberate in his art. Together these daily drawings constitute a visual diary of his personal and political life translated into abstract forms and dynamic lines and entirely free of representational topical content, says the gallery.
The exhibition will be open until May 23.
