EDI HILA | THEA DJORDJADZE

EDI HILA | THEA DJORDJADZE is a trans-generational exhibition of two major artists from Albania and Georgia, both countries with a communist past linked to Soviet Union, and to Eastern Europe and Western Asia history. 

A seminal and highly praised artist of the Balkan region, Edi Hila (*1944 in Shkodër, living and working in Tirana, Albania) has witnessed and captured the social and political history of Albania and is often referred to as »The painter of the Albanian transition«. 

The Hamburger Kunsthalle and the Moderna Museet Malmö (Sweden) are organizing an important survey exhibition of Edi Hila, initiated and curated by Dr. Corinne Diserens and Joa Ljungberg, in close dialogue with the artist. It will include paintings, works on paper and maquettes. The exhibition will trace key moments from the artist’s formative years, including his infamous 1972 painting, Planting of Trees, which, because of its expressive use of color and form (that ran contrary to the approved socialist realist doctrine), led to him being sentenced to three years of forced labor. It will furthermore explore his practice through the 1990s, when the artist carefully observed life after the fall of dictator Enver Hoxha's regime, depicting the realities of the Albanian transformation on the precipice of the new millennium.

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Limiting himself to muted colors and systematically excluding superfluous details, Hila creates dense compositions that transcend straightforward narratives. Series such as Comfort, Migrations, Paradox, Threat, Roadside Objects, Transitional Landscapes, Penthouses, Relations, Martyrs of the Nation Boulevard, and A Tent on the Roof of the Car all reflect aspects of societal upheaval while also transmitting a sense of reverence, tempered by melancholy and subtle irony. 

Architectural layers of history, and the ever-changing urban environment of Albanian towns and cities, often set the stage. The famous master plan, with its complex of public buildings in the centre of Tirana, designed by the Florentine architect Gherardo Bosio during the fascist regime, critically inspired his Boulevard series exhibited at documenta 14. In these paintings, which resemble the backdrops of a tactical war-game video, profound imagery draws the viewer into a world devoid of shadows and without any trace of humanity.

The exhibition will also focus on Hila's recent works, which reveal the limitations and pitfalls of the transformation more than its promises, offering careful observations and subtle psychological insights.

Edi Hila (*1944 in Shkodër, Albania) lives and works in Tirana, Albania. From the 1990s he was Professor and Dean at the Faculty of Fine Arts at the University of Arts in Tirana. Exhibitions (Selection): 2023 Edi Hila. Territore te pervojave te jetuara, Center for Openness and Dialogue, Tirana; Edi Hila. Experienced Territories, Galleria Raffaella Cortese, Milan; 2020 Edi Hila. The Sound of the Tuba, Secession, Vienna; 2018 Edi Hila: Painter of Transformation, Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw; National Gallery of Arts Tirana; Kontakt Collection, Vienna; 2017 documenta 14, Athens/Kassel; 2014 Potential Monuments of Unrealised Futures (with Adrian Paci), Architectural Association, London; Albanian Pavilion 14th International Architecture Exhibition, La Biennale di Venezia.

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Thea Djordjadze (*1971 in Tbilisi, Georgia) was still a student of Fine Arts when the country in 1991 became the first to declare its independence from the Soviet Union, after which a civil war broke out which lasted two years. She continued her education in Western Europe. After a stay at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam, she moved to a newly reunified Germany. She studied at the Staatliche Kunstakademie Düsseldorf before she moved to Berlin, where she has been based since the mid-2000s. 

In her experimental artistic practice, Thea Djordjadze proceeds by means of an informed intuition. Djordjadze's sculptures and environments emerge from the artist's intense engagement with the active and latent energies of a space, using a large range of materials in assemblages of singular poetry. Her works are created in a process that responds to the particular site, sometimes reflexively, sometimes as an immediate reaction to the given conditions. Often, images, forms and ideas from literature, design, painting, architecture – particularly, but not limited to, Modernism – flow into Djordjadze's work, leaving an imprint like an echo of the artist's encounter with them. Thea Djordjadze will create a new body of works for the Hamburger Kunsthalle, offering viewers a spatial, physical and psychological experience. Doing so, the artist will challenge not only the formal and material qualities of the building, but also its situated context. 

Thea Djordjadze (*1971 in Tiflis, Georgien) lives and works in Berlin. Exhibitions (Selection): 2023 Thea Djordjadze: the ceiling of a courtyard, WIELS Contemporary Art Centre, Brussels; 2022 Thea Djordjadze. Se souvenir et témoigner, Musée d'Art Moderne et Contemporain (MAMC), Saint-Etienne Métropole; 2021 Thea Djordjadze: All building as making, Gropius Bau, Berlin; 2018 Thea Djordjadze: o potio n., Portikus, Frankfurt; 2016 Projects 103: Thea Djordjadze, MoMA PS 1, New York; To be in an upright position on the feet (studio visit), Secession, Vienna; 2012 documenta 13, Kassel