“The majority of visitors are very curious to see what happened those years in the language of art, attempts to challenge time and getting out of the frames, formalism,” says Artan Shabani, the director of the National Art Gallery.
TIRANA, July 23 – Some of them have recently been selected to showcase in the premises of the government residence in the coastal city of Vlora, southern Albania. Taken from the collection of the National Gallery in Tirana, the artworks, mainly paintings part of the pavilion of socialist realism also known as the “Creation of the Models of the New Man,” involved a genre serving the communist regime propaganda cultivated between 1960 and 1986.
Asked about the selection of socialist realism works to decorate the government villa, Artan Shabani, the director of the National Gallery says “the major part of the National Gallery’s collection belongs to socialist realism. I have noticed that all collectors and curators show special interest in this period, because not everybody has had the luxury to experiment or touch it. Even Kosovo didn’t have this, and that’s why we will be featuring a full exhibition on socialist realism there.”
“The majority of visitors are very curious to see what happened those years in the language of art, attempts to challenge time and getting out of the frames, formalism etc,” Shabani tells local media.
The Socialist realism genre started in the early 1960s with the return of Albanian artists graduated from East European art schools.
The art of this period is entirely propaganda, serving the interest of the political regime in power. “Based on clich고imported from its originating place, the former Soviet Union, this art focused on the workers and their actions, transforming them into ‘myths’ of the period. In fact, socialist realism does not try to show openly and truthfully the daily aspects of the reality of the working class, but strives to erect and establish the socialist working activity as some sort of a cult while placing the common worker as the main character of a ‘new epoch’,” says the National Gallery about the permanent socialist realism pavilion.
Noted artists who have developed significant works in this genre included Kristaq Rama, Muntaz Dhrami, Zef Shoshi, Pandi Mele, Myrteza Fushekati, Petro Kokushta, Ȭirim Ceka and many others.
The Albanian National Arts Gallery was originally founded in 1954 and moved to its current location on Tirana’s central boulevard in 1974. The national collection of visual arts ranges from a collection of religious icons from the 13th to the 19th century, works from the National Renaissance and Independence period (1883-1944), the biggest painting and sculpture collection in the country from the socialist realism period (1944-1990), as well as a foreign artists’ pavilion and rotating collections of contemporary national and international art.
Some of the most important annual exhibitions include the “Onufri,” international visual arts contest and the Marubi international artistic photography competition.
The gallery is surrounded by a lovely park, and as a special bonus at the rear of the building there are a few still-defiant Communist-era partisan statues clenching their fists at the sky, as well as imposing statues of Lenin and Stalin.
