Albanian Prime Minister Edi Rama earned about €40,000 from the sale of his works of artiart 2019.
Rama, a painter and writer of a book, included the information in his mandatory annual declaration of assets, reported by Open Data Albania.
His revenues from the sale of works of art amount to more than double his annual net salary (€16,000) as prime minister.
Rama’s asset declaration also includes the revenues of his family members. His son, Greg Rama, also a painter, had net revenues of €27,150 from the sale of his works.
Exit News has often reported on Rama’s artistic career.
In 2017, his 2ork was exhibited in the Venice Biennale.
During the opposition protest in the same year, he promoted his Florence exhibition in a major Italian newspaper. The exhibition was hosted by a gallery owned by the brother of Rama’s architect friend Marco Casamonti.
Vincent W.J. van Gerven Oei has written several pieces for Exit News regarding Rama’s relationship with art and politics, and how he navigates between the two.
“When art is the only administration left” looks at Rama’s doodles at the Venice Biennale.
In “Obrist, get over it”, van Gerven Oei claims that Rama uses art to divert the attention of the international community by means of “useful idiots” such as curator Hans Ulrich Obrist.
In “Rama has lost faith in art”, he explains his claim how Rama’s art is not art but art therapy that helps only its author and is hardly meaningful for anyone else.
And lastly, Natan Haasnoot’s extraordinary story of how student protests in 2018 in Albania ironically caused a steep rise in market value of Rama’s art.
