Iva Lulashi

Iva Lulashi moved to Italy in 1997 and enrolled at the Academy of Fine Arts in Venice in 2007, where she began exploring painting as a space of desire, memory, and ideology. In 2024, she returned to Venice to represent Albania at the Biennale, gracefully closing the circle between education and vision.

Her practice is rooted in contrasts: restrained eroticism meets the clear rhetoric of communist propaganda, generating images that hover between attraction and ideological distance. In her most recent phase, she evokes Albanian folklore through legends she heard as a child and that have been passed down through generations, now interwoven with mythological figures rediscovered in theatre. The result is a visual repertoire where the intimate becomes epic and myth slips gracefully into the realm of contemporary imagination.

Iva Lulashi was born in Albania in Tirana in 1988.

Among her recent solo exhibitions are Love as a Glass of Water, Albanian Pavilion, 60th Venice Biennale (2024); Girandoti girandomi, Ordet, hosted by Massimo Giorgetti, Milan (2024); Libere e desideranti, Church of Santa Caterina, curated by the Collezione Giuseppe Iannaccone, Corniglia (2021); Love as a Glass of Water, Salzburger Kunstverein, Salzburg; and Eroticommunism, Prometeo Gallery di Ida Pisani, Milan. She has also taken part in numerous group exhibitions, including: Twilight is a Place of Promise, Esther Schipper, Berlin (2024); Italian Painting Today, Triennale Milano, curated by Damiano Gullì (2023).