Iva Lulashi

Three paintings, exhibited one at a time, each telling distinct female narratives, yet bound together by the tragic, mystical, and sensual passage from body to otherworldly states, through the act of sacrifice.

Iva Lulashi (b. 1988, Tirana), a leading figure in the recent revival of Italian painting, inaugurates a new cycle of her practice with a project that is at once intimate narrative and theatrical device, private imaginary and paradigmatic tale.

The very structure of the exhibition constitutes a statement of intent: three large canvases, shown in succession, mark the temporal unfolding of the display, as immobile acts of a silent theatrical pièce. As in theatre, duration is integral to the work, and vision is always partial, deferred.

Drama and staging define this pictorial cycle, a virtual triptych whose protagonists are female figures drawn from diverse literary contexts: the fable-like dimension of the Albanian legend of Rozafa, foundational myth of the city of Shkodra, homeland of the artist’s family; the erotic-sacral tension of Sancta Susanna (1921), expressionist work by Paul Hindemith; the collective martyrdom of a convent of nuns during the French Revolution as recounted in Georges Bernanos’ Dialogues des Carmélites (c. 1948). Different stories recomposed into a coherent, feverish pictorial syntax, visually united by the centrality of the female body, the site where the conflict between eros and sacrifice, between desire and surrender, is enacted.