Edi Hila | Thea Djordjadze

Edi Hila | Thea Djordjadze is a trans-generational double 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.

Thea Djordjadze

Thea Djordjadze was born in 1971 in Tbilisi, Georgia. In 1991, she was still a student of Fine Arts when the country 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 training in Western Europe. After a stint at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam, she moved to a newly reunified Germany. She studied at the Staatliche Kunstakademie Düsseldorf before to move 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 acute 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.

Edi Hila

Edi Hila (b. 1944 in Shkodër, living and working in Tirana, Albania) 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), initiated and curated by Dr. Corinne Diserens and Joa Ljungberg, has been organized in close dialogue with the artist. It includes paintings, works on paper, and maquettes, and is accompanied by a comprehensive publication published in English, German, and Swedish.

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 (that ran contrary to the approved doctrine of socialist realism), 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 towns and cities often set the stage. The famous master plan, with its complex of public buildings in Tirana’s centre, designed by the Florentine architect Gherardo Bosio during the fascist regime, critically inspired Edi Hila’s Boulevard series. In these paintings, which resemble the backdrops of tactical war game videos, profound imagery draws the viewer into a world devoid of shadows and with few signs of human life. 

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. 

Following his participation at the Biennale di Venezia in 1999 and at documenta 14 in 2017, as well as his solo exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw and the National Gallery of Arts in Tirana, Edi Hila has garnered international acclaim. 

Curator

• Dr. Corinne Diserens

Assistant Curator

• Leona Marie Ahrens

Curatorial Trainee

• Jana Pfort