Edi Hila and Thea Djordjadze is a trans-generational 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.

Edi Hila (b. 1944 in Shkodër, 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 Dis-erens 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 ex-pressive 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.

Thea Djordjadze (b. in 1971 in Tbisili, Georgia) was still a fine arts student when Georgia became one of the first countries to declare its independence from the Soviet Union in 1991, after which a civil war broke out that lasted for two years. She continued her training in Western Europe. After a stint at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam, she went to a newly reunified Germany. She studied at the Staatliche Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, with Dieter Krieg and Rosemarie Trockel, before moving to Berlin, where she has been based since the mid-2000s.

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