Surf painting announced Onufri’s winner

TIRANA, Feb. 6 – Young Shkodra painter Sidi Kanani has been announced the winner of the 18th edition of the Onufri visual arts competition. Kanani was awarded the competition’s first prize for his painting featuring a surfer.
“I feel appreciated and this prize makes me more responsible,” Kanani told reporters, unveiling that through his works he mostly focuses on remote areas of the northern Shkodra region.
The second prize went to Shpetim Kercova for his painting showing the modern consumer society.
The winners were selected by an international jury composed of 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.
This year’s exhibition of the Onufri Competition, ‘The Painting of Modern Life’, open since December 22, 2011 at the National Gallery in Tirana, was 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 annual 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.