IBRAHIM KODRA

13 April - 20 May 2012

Fantastic Albania

In the temporary exhibitions wing of the National Gallery will open to the public, from 13 April until 20 May 2012, the exhibition of Ibrahim Kodra entitled “Fantastic Albania”, curated by Rubens Shima, Director of the National Gallery. The exhibition has been organized in collaboration between the National Gallery of Arts and the “Ibrahim Kodra” Foundation (Italy) on occasion of Albania’s 100 Years of Independence Anniversary. For this exhibition the curator has chosen works from the collection of “Ibrahim Kodra” Foundation in Italy, from the private collection of Mr. Kozma Dashi in Albania, from the fund of the National Gallery of Arts, as well as works from other private collections in Albania and abroad.

Ibrahim Kodra was born in Ishëm, Tirana in 1918. He spent his childhood in Albania in an atmosphere of political and economic hardship, most especially in the years following the end of the First World War. In the 1930s, having finished his general education, Kodra joined the newly opened art school in Tirana “The Albanian Drawing School”. In 1938, benefiting from the close relations of King Zog’s Albania to Italy, Kodra managed to get a scholarship to the Academy of Fine Arts of Brera, in Milan. He then moved to Italy to study painting with the esteemed professors Carra, Funi and Carpi. After his academic studies concluded, Kodra decided to stay on in Milan. Though this period coincided with the difficult end of the Second World War, Kodra opened his own atelier. Beginning from 1948 and continuing through the 1950s Kodra became part of important collective exhibitions organized in Italy and later on in Paris, France. His artistic career culminated in 1953 when he participated in the Exhibition of the University of Paris where his work was shown alongside Picasso, Chagall, Matisse, Modigliani and many others. From that moment on, Kodra became an established painter in Italy and beyond, exhibiting individually in various museums and galleries in Europe and eventually in New York, USA (Princess Hall Gallery, 1963).

In 1973 Ibrahim Kodra received the award of the French Academy of Arts, Sciences and Literature. He lived and worked until the end of his life (2006) in his atelier in Milan on Ragosta Square.

Ibrahim Kodra’s paintings are a strange combination of worlds: the original one carried over from his homeland, with its motives and history, often labeled oriental by the Italian press, coupled with the world of his western art influences born out of the avant-garde movements at the dawn of 20th century. It is this fusion that makes Kodra quite a unique artist. Art critic Carlo Bo has suggested that although Kodra comes from a different culture, he enters into a relationship with Western art and the Western world as an equal, resisting deference to its norms and aesthetics. If anything, he employs the language of the avant-garde (cubism and surrealism), to reinforce his different background and original language, which plainly shows its ancient past. Thus, Kodra’s Cubism is not an attempt to dismantle the object but to remake it, turning his painting into a high precision tool, helping to better understand and judge Western art and culture, choosing instead the path of a critical encounter with the latter.