TIRANA, May 28 – One of Albania’s best 20th century artists, painter Sali Shijaku, is bringing back 60 years of creativity in a solo exhibition at the National Art Gallery.
The exhibition, which is the first the artist has opened at the country’s biggest art gallery for the past two decades, will feature Shijaku in 73 paintings created during the pre-90s period under communism, and the post 1990s period when he was freed of the restriction imposed by the socialist realism, also known as the “Creation of the models of the New Man,” a genre serving the communist regime propaganda cultivated between 1960 and 1986.
Speaking at the exhibition’s inauguration ceremony, Artan Shabani, the director of the National Gallery, described the veteran artist as an icon of Albania’s painting and colours.
“His most qualitative art and his creativity in general are part of the fundamental cultural of traditional visual art in Albania. Shijaku’s creativity and his presence at the National Gallery is an undisputed value and that’s why I think that this will be one of the most visited exhibitions,” said Shabani.
The veteran painter’s works in this exhibition are displayed in two periods, two stances and two interpretations toward the visual world.
The pre-1990s period, showcases Shijaku as a young artist in the 1950s when the art of painting in Albania was connected with little but invaluable academic experience brought by a generation of passionate and professional painters, organizers say.
Sali Shijaku became an artist with the desire to go through and beyond the western academism and he succeeded when he lived and went beyond even another different academism such as the eastern one. “At the beginning of the 1960s, he turned back to the Albanian visual atmosphere with the artist’s passion to bring a change into the decade and today we think he has achieved this with together with his colleagues,” says the National Gallery.
In the post-1990s period, Sali Shijaku comes as a veteran painter who continues creating by transforming his world of paintings. Almost three decades after the collapse of the communist regime, the artist continues painting and does this with a sensitive conversation with colours and his soft fingertips. His topics are simple and ordinary, you can see them in the everyday life, in tales and other stories.
Painter Ksenofon Dilo describes his colleague Shijaku as an artist who has worked on a great number of portraits, landscapes, still nature and other creations which time after time, through a rainbow of warm and happy colours. They complete the character and traits of his work not only as spontaneous inspirations and not cerebral inspirations of life, but also for the rich chromatic palette which gradually gets rid of burdened shapes as seen in the post 1990s, in favourable conditions and cultural atmosphere, where he has been living and working for years.
Shijaku, 82, is a veteran painter and sculptor who has mostly treated historical and military topics. His large Ottoman-era konak house surrounded by a lovely garden and a high wall in downtown Tirana is a museum house which also serves as an art gallery.
After graduating from the Jordan Misja Arts Lyceum in Tirana in 1954, Sali Shijaku studied from 1957 to 1961 at the academy of arts, Leningrad (now St Petersburg) and the higher institute of art, Tirana (1962). His work, violent, lyrical and passionate, derives its inspiration from revolutionary ideas and depicts action.
The exhibition will remain on display at the National Art Gallery, which is home to a huge collection of Shijaku’s works, for one month from May 28 to June 28.
