EDI HILA: SOLO SHOW
Mitterrand | Temple is pleased to present the fifth solo exhibition at the gallery of Edi Hila (born in 1944 in Shkodër, Albania), a major figure in the Albanian and European art scene. Through a series of new works, the artist continues his exploration of the relationship between memory, architecture, and perception, placing painting at the intersection of the real and the symbolic.
For several decades, Edi Hila has been developing a body of work in which pictorial material becomes a place for reflection on history and the human condition. Trained under the communist dictatorship, he experienced censorship and constraint before imposing, at a distance from the systems, a profoundly free style of painting. Without ever adopting the language of direct protest, Hila questions the complexity of the social and psychological transformations of his time.
His new paintings take as their starting point the mountainous landscape of southeastern Albania. Between nature and architecture, the motifs unfold in suspended spaces: staircases, facades, mountains, and valleys merge in the same tension between stability and imbalance. Classical perspectives fragment, fold back, or block, expressing the sensation of a closed world, crisscrossed by invisible faults.
Hila conceives this approach to landscape as an inner metaphor. Her paintings are imbued with a dual movement: inward, in search of the chambers of the soul; downward, into the depths of the earth and buried memories. Between the rigor of the composition and the softness of the tones—grays, greens, whites—a poetry of matter unfolds, where each surface seems to breathe.
A painter of subtlety and silence, Edi Hila claims a paradoxical realism, where painting does not describe reality but offers another, born of the gaze and memory. Using reworked photographs, he constructs images where everyday life becomes symbolic, and where local history takes on a universal dimension.
For Hila, mountains, houses, roads, and facades are never mere subjects: they are fragments of a thought, signs of a world seeking balance between past and present, between isolation and openness.
This exhibition comes at a time of institutional recognition for the artist, with two solo exhibitions in 2026, one at the Moderna Museet in Malmö and the second at the Madre in Naples. His work is also held in several major public collections, including that of the Centre Pompidou.
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