
We are proud to present Al di là del vetro, Edi Hila’s first solo show with Galleria Raffaella Cortese and our first exhibition of works on canvas in over 25 years of programming.
After visiting the gallery’s spaces, the Albanian artist conceived this project entirely from home, where he rebuilt the three exhibition venues as maquettes. In Tirana, he created each site-specific work meditating on the idea of displacement—mental and physical—and on the gallery as a fluid container for the assembly and disassembly of ideas. The result thus broadens the usual boundaries of the pictorial medium: each painting is site-specific, inextricably linked to the architecture—both of the exhibition space and of the portrayed locations—and the objects that inhabit them, as well as the photographic act that is at the origin of each work.
Edi Hila (Shkodër, Albania, 1944) has borne witness to the social and political history of Albania. Through his life experience, sensitivity, and painting practice, his work reaches peaks of great poignancy. Trained at the Academy of Fine Arts in Tirana in the early sixties, he found in the lessons of Danish Jukni the only possible access to the knowledge of contemporary art in Albania under Enver Hoxha’s communist regime. Despite the difficulties stemming from the intellectual isolation mandated by the regime, he managed to deepen his understanding of twentieth-century art history. In 1972 he realized the well-known painting Planting of Trees with a technique that was far from the doctrines taught at the Academy, finding joy in chromatism, as well as in gesture, which immediately created serious problems for him. The attitude of freedom to express one’s happiness in that painting was the principal reason that led the regime to distance him from painting for years. In the seventies and eighties he was indeed forced to work in a re-education camp in the poultry industry. Only after the fall of communism in Albania, in the nineties, he returned to painting and began to define the style and content that also characterize the works exhibited in this first show of his in Galleria Raffaella Cortese’s three spaces.
Installation views








