Edi Rama | Chrysalizing | SOCIÉTÉ | 01.05.-27.06.2026

The exhibition‘s title conjures a suspended, generative moment of transformation. This sense of movement resonates across Rama‘s practice: in the passage from drawing to sculpture, in the biomorphic forms his new works assume, and in the broader arc of a life lived at the threshold between artistic and political identity.

Trained as a painter at the Academy of Fine Arts in Tirana, where he subsequently taught as a professor, Rama has pursued an artistic practice in parallel with a political career spanning nearly three decades—first as Minister of Culture, then as Mayor of Tirana from 2000 to 2011, and as Prime Minister since 2013. These two spheres of activity have always informed each other: as mayor, Rama transformed Tirana‘s crumbling communist-era buildings through an ambitious program of colorful geometric facades, demonstrating at the scale of a city that the aesthetic and the political could be one and the same act. It was through this process that his drawing practice first emerged: printing the facades on A4 sheets, he began experimenting with felt tip markers to determine which colors the buildings would be painted—a process that eventually evolved into the vivid stream-of-consciousness drawings made as Prime Minister during meetings at the Kryeministria, Albania‘s seat of government.

These mindscapes act as a springboard for experimentation: organic blots and amorphous shapes evolve into compositions that resist fixed reference or narrative. Rama‘s drawings belong to a lineage of mark-making in which the suspension of conscious control is understood as access to a different order of thinking.

For Chrysalizing, Rama presents a series of new bronze sculptures. Spanning the first floor of the gallery and extending outdoors into the garden, forms on pedestals and low plinths surge, swell, swirl, and multiply. Where earlier ceramic works evoked tactile accumulations of ribbony architectural shapes, these come closer to primordial states of mutation—vegetal, fantastical, creaturely, belonging to no known taxonomy, as if surfacing from some deeper stratum of the subconscious.

Rama created the works by translating his drawings into 3D-printed forms, which he then modeled by hand before casting in bronze. This chain of translations—from drawn line to digital model, back through the artist‘s hands, and finally into a material historically bound to commemoration and the official consecration of power—carries the residue of unguarded mark-making into a form associated with permanence and public authority.

Measuring over two meters, a mushroom-like form can be viewed in the garden from the window of the exhibition. Undulating shapes at the base push upward to splinter into a proliferation of organic growths—the branching structure of Rama‘s first outdoor sculpture, evoking networks of interrelation and emergent connection. A related large-scale bronze will be presented outdoors on the Rhine near Clarastrasse as part of Art Basel Parcours in June 2026.

Opening: Thursday, 30. April 2026, 6 until 8 pm