More promises broken than kept, in many years. I mean young artists who, at the dawn of their stylistic adventure, used engraving with passion and skill, creating beautiful sheets, and then, more or less quickly, abandoning it, getting lost along the way, often completely losing the vein. At the beginning, all poets, at the end only some still such. Among these, Agim Sako.
I printed his first two engravings in 2006, for the 9th edition of the Almanacco di Italia Nostra - an excellent initiative for the diffusion of the art of engraving, which unfortunately ceased in 2017. Etchings still academic, but especially in one those dense signs which, despite drawing the nude they seem to want to look for an escape route, to escape from internal space, they struck me then with an effect of intrinsic vitality. And already there appears, in embryo, what will be the theme of "plots" typical of Sako. Those who know how to look will easily identify the two details.
Today many of his engravings, with an unmistakable style and unique iconography, lead the observation from the general to the particular, through a language that smells of the East and the North, which recalls atmospheres but not recognizable fathers. Sako's language, a promise kept.
Arnoldo Manfredi November 2023
Agim Sako was born in Divjake (Albania), in 1982. In 2000 he graduated from the "Jakov Xoxa" Art School in Fier. In the same year he moved to Italy, where in 2008 he obtained a diploma in painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Bologna. His activity as a painter has always been accompanied by that of an engraver, a passion for engraving which leads him to be, together with some engraver friends and enthusiasts, one of the founding members of the Officina della Stampa of Bologna and a member of the Association of Free Engravers. He currently teaches Graphic Arts at the Academy of Bologna and Ravenna.
It is present in various national and international events including: IV and V Biennial of the Mestre Prize P.F. Alberto Benvenuti (Mestre); II Biennial of Engraving Giuseppe Maestri, Youth Prize (Bagnacavallo, Ravenna); XXII Edition of the Giorgio Morandi Engraving Prize (Bologna); XVI Edition of the Chalcography Prize (Gorlago, Bergamo); Engraving as a social comment, Cappucine Civic Museum, Bagnacavallo (Ravenna) 2018; Empathies/Contaminations, Dialogues between matter and sign, Fabbrica del Vapore, Sala Colonne, Milan, 2018; Shenja and king Shqiptare, Graphics, II,III, IV edition, Galeria and Artit Fier "Vilson Kilica", Fier (Albania); Est(remi), Elle Galleria, Preganziol (Treviso) 2016; Odysseus - My name is nobody, Galleria "Luigi Struzo", Mestre, 2014; VIII Biennial of Contemporary Italian Engraving, city of Campobasso; IX World Triennial of L'Estampe, Chamalières- Auvergne, France; Rivers of Art Industry Recycling, curated by Tobia Donà, Pescheria Nuova, Rovigo, 2013; 57th Niballo- Palio di Faenza, dedicated to the Lordship of the Manfredi for the 700th anniversary, Faenza, 2013; Pointe et Burin, Gravers d'Italie, Fondation Taylor, Paris (France) 2012.