Edi Hila/Thea Djordjadze

Edi Hila is a seminal and highly praised artist of the Balkan region. Having witnessed and captured the social and political history of Albania, he is often referred to as “the painter of the Albanian transition”. This important survey exhibition of Edi Hila at the Hamburger Kunsthalle (Germany) and Moderna Museet Malmö (Sweden), curated by Corinne Diserens and Joa Ljungberg, has been organized in close dialogue with the artist.

Tracing key moments from the artist’s formative years, among the works on show is Edi Hila’s infamous 1971 painting, Planting of Trees, which, because of its expressive use of colour and form, led to him being sentenced to three years of forced labour. The exhibition also explores the artist’s practice through the 1990s, when he 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.

Limiting himself to a palette of muted colours and systematically excluding superfluous details, Hila creates dense compositions that transcend straightforward narratives. Series such as Comfort, Migrations, Paradox, Threat, Roadside Objects, Transitional Landscapes, Penthouse, Relations, Martyrs of the Nation Boulevard, and A Tent on the Roof of a Car all reflect aspects of societal upheaval while also transmitting a sense of reverence, tempered by melancholy and subtle irony. Layers of architectural history and the ever-changing urban environment witnessed in Albania’s cities often set the stage. The exhibition also focuses on Edi Hila’s recent works, which reveal the limitations and pitfalls of the transformation more than its promises, offering careful observations and subtle psychological insights.

Thea Djordjadze (b. in Tbilisi, Georgia) was still a student of fine arts in 1991 when the country became one of the first to declare its independence from the Soviet Union, after which a civil war broke out that lasted for two years. After a stint at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie, Djordjadze went to a newly reunified Germany where she studied at the Staatliche Kunstakademie Düsseldorf.

In her experimental practice, Thea Djordjadze proceeds by means of an informed intuition. Her sculptures, photographs, paintings, and environments emerge from her acute engagement with the active and latent energies of a space, using a broad range of materials in assemblages of singular poetry. Her artistic process-driven practice explores and responds to the specific place, sometimes reflectively, at other times as an immediate reaction to the given conditions. Often, images, forms, and ideas—from literature, design, painting, art history, and architecture, by and large, but not always, Modernist—flow into her work, leaving an imprint like an echo of the artist’s encounter with them.

Thea Djordjadze has conceived and produced a new body of work for the Hamburger Kunsthalle, offering viewers a spatial, physical, and psychological experience and an awareness of how one moves through the whole space, prompting people to look elsewhere than usual. In doing so, the artist challenges not only the formal and material qualities of the Kunsthalle building’s first floor and atrium but also reveals their sensitive context, negative spaces, and sources of light which play on the works, walls, and floor, making architectonic and spatial conditions perceptible in an amplified way.

Djordjadze’s exhibitions are intentionally anachronistic; past configurations and insights surface, enchanting the present experiences and events.

Publications
EDI HILA / Language: German/English / 29.5 × 26 cm hardcover, 200 pages / Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther und Franz König.

THEA DJORDJAZE / Language: English/German / 21 x 38 cm softcover, 296 pages / Distanz Verlag / Supported by: Freunde der Kunsthalle e.V., Philipp Otto Runge Stiftung.

Hamburger Kunsthalle 
Glockengießerwall 5, D-20095 Hamburg