21 December 2012–21 January 2013
Kosovo National Gallery
Agim Ramadani 60
Pristina, Kosovo
T 00381 38 225627 / 227833
gak [at] kujtesa.com
Curated by Angela Vettese
The Kosovo National Gallery is proud to present the first large solo show of Adrian Paci in Kosovo. The work of Adrian Paci has a strong narrative dimension, tied to the places, people, and emotions it describes, but at the same time it’s able to take the distance and to develop a critical aproach focusing on paradoxes, tensions and conflicts of the human condition through a language that is at the same time simple and sophisticated.
Adrian Paci shows us the violent side of poverty, the tender faces of children, the challenge of the determination to succeed, the binding of wounds, the false lament of paid mourners and the true lament etched in the toothless mouths of those who after a lifetime of toil, finally smile. But the artist also shows us the questions that we can pose about art, which become all the more vast with the intersection of cultured and popular traditions, the hybridization of techniques, the overlapping of hypotheses about how we can really communicate. In a palindromic back-and-forth between narration and the analysis of expressive tools, the journey is the language of living and of the work, and only the refinement of this language—the act of communication and all those questions about how do to so as an artist—can generate, justify, and repay the journey itself.
—Angela Vettese
Adrian Paci was born in 1969 in Albania. After the conflicts in Albania, he relocated to Milan in 1997, where he has lived and worked ever since. Although originally trained in Tirana as a painter, in Milan he began experimenting with the medium of video. This allowed him to develop and articulate an ongoing narrative exploring the consequences of political shifts in his country, as well as commemorating its traditions and customs.
After representing Albania at the Venice Biennale in 1999 and showing at Manifesta 3 in Ljubjana in 2003, his work has been subject of many solo and group exhibitions: Bildmuseet Umea, Sweden (2001); GAMeC Bergamo (2002); MoMa PS1, New York; Moderna Museet, Stockholm (2005); Kunstverein, Hannover; Tel Aviv Contemporary Art Center (2008); Bloomberg Space, London; Kunsthaus Zurich; and Istanbul Modern (2010). Among numerous group shows, he has participated in the Venice Biennale (2005); Tate Modern, London (2008); and Maxxi, Rome (2009).
Since 2003, he has been a lecturer in visual arts at the Accademia Carrara di Belle Arti in Bergamo and the Università IUAV in Venice. Paci currently resides and works in Milan, where he is lecturer at NABA, Nuova Accademia di Belle Arti.
