Artan Shalsi
Two suspended pale works from the 2% immanence and impermanence installation
2% immanence | impermanence Galleria d'Arte Niccoli, Parma, 2023 · Courtesy Galleria Niccoli

Sculpture / Installation / Drawing

Artan Shalsi

Selected works, 2009–2025

Matter becomes
Discover
Position 01

Images and language held at the threshold of visibility.

Matter, stripped of the superfluous, becomes a silent and disciplined language.

Across changing bodies of work, Artan Shalsi uses subtraction and reduction to slow the gaze and make the viewer an active participant. In the current 2% cycle, portraits and texts are reduced to a threshold of 2% visibility: they appear, withdraw and return as light, distance and position change. The red verso of each work extends the image into the surrounding space, while industrial materials become carriers of memory, duration and perception.

Current gallery collaborations / Italy
Galleria d'Arte Niccoli, Parma
ARTEA Gallery, Milan
Galleria Il Ponte, Florence
Recent recognition
Overall Winner / ARTEAM Cup 2024
Institutional context
Italian Pavilion
17th Venice Architecture Biennale / 2021
Currently
Three new text works
Group exhibition / September 2026
Representation
Open to representation and exhibition projects / Germany & DACH

In his own words

I grew up in the only officially atheist state in the world. The churches of Berat had become museums, and as a child I was almost afraid of the icons there: the eyes of the saints seemed to follow me.

An icon does not try to go unnoticed. The gold, the stones, the luminous ground — everything in it works towards being seen. In my work, everything moves in the opposite direction. Everything approaches white.

Two per cent is the least presence necessary for something to continue to exist in front of our eyes, and still demand time in order to be seen. The image is not refused. It is withheld.

It is not nostalgia. What interests me is how memory goes on acting in the present, and can take a new form.

Artan Shalsi, Parma, 2026

Read the full notes
Selected works 02

01

Portraits and texts

2% immanence /
impermanence

2021–2025

Works joined by a research into perception and the time of looking. The work asks the viewer to stop and to concentrate the gaze. Time becomes part of the work.

Graphite drawn freehand, or printed at two per cent opacity, on the reverse of plexiglass whose face is abraded until no memory of the industrial material remains. The verso of each work is painted red and hung clear of the wall.

The centuries-old tradition of the Byzantine icon — to which the artist openly refers, drawing on an imagery that reaches back into his childhood and to the iconographic topoi of the sacred panels of his region of origin. Starting precisely from the processes of optical accommodation, the artist chooses to extend the time of looking, and to withdraw the image — and our relationship to images — from the transience of everyday consumption.

Roberto Lacarbonara · 2% immanence | impermanence

2% / Film / 04:06

Portrait, memory, place and the visual sources behind the current body of work.

A conversation between Artan Shalsi and the critic and curator Roberto Lacarbonara · Directed by Viviana Berti · In Italian, with Italian subtitles

What at first appears to be a white rectangle can slowly reveal a face, a form or a word.

I want the text to lead to an image that is not depicted, but that comes into being in the mind of the viewer.

Process film / 00:49

Language made visible by removal.

Drawing, transfer and abrasion are not preparatory gestures. They determine how little of an image can remain while still being perceived. The most recent works return to freehand graphite: the time of the hand, and of the artist's own training.

Studio process / sound available

2% / Recognition

Overall Winner
ARTEAM Cup 2024

Graphite, plexiglass, dibond and iron
97 × 90 cm

02

Thought and matter

Sculpture and research into material

Matter forms one of the oldest and most constant cores of Artan Shalsi's research. Trained as a sculptor, he sets the tradition of sculpture in relation to the materials and sensibilities of the present, entering a dialogue with modern abstraction and the rigour of minimalism.

Matter is the place where thought takes form.

As Matteo Galbiati has written, his research builds a relationship between “memory and imagination, between tradition and innovation”. Rosa Cinelli describes Shalsi's work as “a question of substance”.

03

Site-specific installations

Work and space

Here space becomes part of the work. Shalsi intervenes in the proportions, surfaces, paths and perceptual conditions of a place and creates new relationships between work, architecture and viewer. The work does not merely occupy the space: it can change how the space is perceived.

A 120-metre band of stainless steel draws one continuous, soft, curving line and wraps the entire gallery.

This work does not depict the horizon as such — it is a horizon, one of infinitely many possible horizons.

On UN ORIZZONTE, Elena Forin has emphasised the artist's ability “to relate to space and to open himself to it, understood as environment”.

These small hills of wax I recovered and keep: they still carry their scent.

04

Conceptual research

Systems, phenomena and possibilities

Alongside the more clearly defined cycles, Shalsi develops research whose starting point may be a concept, a phenomenon or a system. What matters is not the phenomenon itself, but the possibility of altering its conditions and, through that alteration, transforming perception.

For all our attempts to measure and control it, time remains a fluid idea.

To mark time without measuring it; to be a witness of what does not return.

05

Environmental art

Selected public and private commissions

In some projects the research extends to the place, the landscape, the architecture and the surroundings. Metal surfaces, reflective elements and other materials enter into relation with what surrounds the work and make the border between object and place unstable. The environment enters the work, and the work gives the environment back in altered form.

P_L_BA_AIS_CO_09_66

A curved double plane places a pristine mirrored surface beside weathering Cor-Ten steel. The reflection draws the landscape and the viewer into the sculpture, while the oxidized skin records exposure and time. The surrounding park is no longer a background: it becomes part of the work.

Materials
Mirror, stainless steel, Cor-Ten steel
Dimensions
300 × 210 × 30 cm
Location
MACA Sculpture Park, Maldonado, Uruguay
Collection
MACA — Fundación Pablo Atchugarry

“The works become effective and alive through the participation of the viewer.” — Elena Forin

Buonanotte Contemporanea · Mirror stainless steel and iron · 1600 × 70 × 15 cm · Montebello sul Sangro, Chieti · Shown at the Italian Pavilion, 17th Venice Architecture Biennale, 2021 · Collection of the Comune di Montebello

Site-specific installation · EL wire, steel, aluminium, control unit · 200 × 200 × 200 cm · Collection Le Officine Culturali, Atessa

Site-specific installation · Stainless steel, Cor-Ten steel · 398 × 325 × 352 cm · Private collection, Liguria

Glass and stainless steel · 322 × 172 × 200 cm · Private collection

Cor-Ten steel · 450 × 320 × 230 cm · Private collection, Parma

The reflecting surface of the steel becomes the language of the sculpture.

06

Works on paper

Sign, surface and memory

Work on paper forms an independent field of research, in which gesture and matter become language.

Biography / exhibitions 03

Artan Shalsi

Artan Shalsi (b. 1970, Berat, Albania) is an Albanian-born Italian artist who lives and works in Parma. He studied at the Xhindolli School of Art in Berat from 1984 to 1988 and moved permanently to Italy in 2003. He currently collaborates with Galleria d'Arte Niccoli, Parma, Galleria Il Ponte, Florence, and ARTEA Gallery, Milan, while remaining open to gallery representation and exhibition projects in Germany and the DACH region.

His practice encompasses sculpture, installation and drawing. His work has been presented in galleries, museums, public spaces and sculpture parks in Italy and internationally.

Portrait of Artan Shalsi

Selected solo exhibitions

  1. Nel respiro del tempo, Fortezza del Priamàr, Savona, Italy
  2. 2% immanence | impermanence, Galleria d'Arte Niccoli, Parma, Italy
  3. Waiting to board the plane, CRAC Gallery, Terni, Italy
  4. Artan Shalsi, Artea Gallery, Milan, Italy
  5. Pensieri e Materie, De Primi Fine Art, Lugano, Switzerland
  6. Morbida 120, Galleria d'Arte Niccoli, Parma, Italy
  7. Un Orizzonte, Galleria Il Ponte, Florence, Italy

Selected exhibitions / projects

  1. Feelings, Palazzo Oldofredi Tadini Botti, Torre Pallavicina, Italy
  2. Utopiche Seduzioni, Fondazione Dino Zoli, Forlì, Italy
  3. I Rossori dell'Arte, Ronchini Gallery, London, UK
  4. Italian Pavilion, 17th Venice Architecture Biennale, Venice, Italy
  5. Attraverso le Avanguardie, APE Parma Museo, Parma, Italy
  6. Sculpture Park, MACA — Fundación Pablo Atchugarry, Uruguay

Portfolio, English Portfolio, Deutsch

Publications 04

Catalogues

  • Artan (Shalsi) — a horizon Site-specific, Galleria Il Ponte, Florence, 2012 · Curated with catalogue text by Elena Forin
  • Artan (Shalsi) ArteA Gallery, Milan, 2019 · Curated with catalogue text by Matteo Galbiati
  • Artan (Shalsi) — P_L_AI_19_289 Genesis of a sculpture: process, matter, space · Niccoli Arte, Parma, 2019

Selected bibliography

  • Espoarte, Contemporary Art MagazineYear XXVI, no. 128, 2025 · Cover artist and interview
  • ArtribuneInterview with the artist, February 2025
  • Direzione Generale Creatività ContemporaneaItalian Ministry of Culture · Silvana Editoriale, 2023 · 562 pp.
  • I Rossori dell'ArteRonchini Gallery, London, 2023 · 68 pp.
  • Albanian Contemporary ArtXhoan Guga, 2022 · 316 pp.
  • Exchiesetta, formerly Galleria Pino PascaliCultour Società Benefit, 2021 · 64 pp.
  • Pablo Atchugarry Foundation, Uruguay10 Years, 2017 · 246 pp. · Cover artist
  • Albania / Knots163 Contemporary Artists from Albania · Imago Mundi, Luciano Benetton Collection, 2015 · 376 pp.
  • FeelingsPalazzo Oldofredi Tadini Botti, Torre Pallavicina, 2024 · 80 pp.
  • Gazzetta di ParmaNovember 2023

Contact

For exhibitions, projects and representation.

Email

studio@artanshalsi.com

+39 388 388 5600

Studio

Parma, Italy

Available for Germany / DACH

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Artan Shalsi · P. IVA IT02637760345 · C.F. SHLRTN70B17Z100Y