The artist’s book presents a selection of source images and visual materials that relate to Hila’s painting practice and to his sustained engagement with architecture, public space, and the social transformations of Albania and post-socialist Europe.

Hila’s work is marked by a precise and restrained pictorial language. His paintings often depict buildings, construction sites, urban fragments, provisional structures, and public spaces that appear emptied of spectacle yet charged with historical and political resonance. Maquettes focuses on the visual groundwork behind this practice: photographs, models, and image fragments that function less as documentation than as instruments of observation and translation.

The book gives insight into how Hila moves from seen reality to painted image. It foregrounds the role of photography in his work, not as a neutral record, but as a way of isolating forms, atmospheres, and spatial tensions. In this sense, Maquettes is not a conventional exhibition catalogue, but an artist’s book that opens up the preparatory and conceptual layers of Hila’s painting. Edi Hila. Maquettes was published by Secession and Revolver Publishing in 2020 on the occasion of Hila’s exhibition The Sound of the Tuba at the Vienna Secession.