Edi Rama, prime minister of Albania for over a decade, is hardly an art world novice. He studied at the Academy of Arts in his native Tirana, and was a professor there as well. He was a working artist in Paris in the ‘90s, before returning to serve as Albania’s minister of culture in 1998. Rama became mayor of Tirana in 2000, and prime minister in 2013.
Yet it still came as a surprise to many—even those in the know at ARTnews!—when the well-regarded contemporary art gallery Société announced that it is representing the politician/artist. Rama joins an international group of artists on Société’s roster like Trisha Baga, Lu Yang, and Petra Cotright.
Last year, Marian Goodman exhibited his work at the gallery’s Paris space, a series of boldly-colored ceramic sculptures that look like they could have been excavated from a coral reef, as well as abstract works on paper—many of which are calendar pages—and wallpaper.
A 2016 profile of the PM in the Financial Times noted that Rama’s first order of business when hosting Angela Merkel, then the chancellor of Germany, was to introduce her to a group of prominent European contemporary artists, all of whom were in town for the opening of the city’s Centre for Openness and Dialogue. The FT profile is full of such delightful art-related anecdotes: Rama’s office is stocked with boxes of crayons; the colorful wallpaper is covered with his workday doodles; and he learned about the “magical power of art” via a contentious rotation of paintings in his grandmother’s kitchen.
At Société, Rama will show more of the ceramics and works on paper—often created during meetings and phone calls on repurposed official documents—that he’s been creating for the past decade.
The gallery hasn’t yet announced a date for Rama’s first exhibition.
