Leon Çika was born in Tirana, a well-known Albanian painter, graphic designer, stage designer, cameraman and photographer in the XX-XXI centuries. Çika graduated from the High Institute of Arts, Tirana, in the graphics department (1977). Leon Çika participated in the group of Albanian artists who designed and realized the interior parts of the “Gjergj Kastrioti Skënderbeu” National Museum, Krujë (1979-1982). He directed the photo lab of the Albanian Telegraphic Agency for several years and was a journalist from 1993-2019 for the “Reuter” agency in Tirana. Leon Çika belongs to the Albanian landscape painters of nature with an impressionistic tendency, focusing on the urban landscape of the museum cities of Albania. In the pictorial cycles of 2005, Leon Çika experimented towards a formalist painting with bold and abstract colors. Leon Çika participated in all the national exhibitions organized in Albania until 1990. He is the author of the album “Berati” and of the photographs of several important publications on Albanian artists and iconography. (In the photo: Çika’s work “Old Tirana with Snow, 1988, oil on canvas.)
Text: Drishti Y., 100 years of Tirana in painting; 1920–2020 , “Mediaprint”, Tirana, 2020, page 140.
Photo: © Drishti Y., personal archive.
Graphic processing: AHCF
