Saimir Strati - record mosaicist

2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55

By hammering thousands of nails into wood planks and gluing corks to canvas, Albanian artist Saimir Strati creates stunning contemporary mosaics that deserve the highest praise and appreciation. It's really amazing how rich in imagination and creativity an artist has, and how a person has the patience to create such art.

Saimir Strati, one of the world's most renowned mosaic painters, is a member of the British Contemporary Mosaic Association. Applying the same techniques as the mosaic masters of the past 3,000 years ago, the master breathes new life into ancient art using familiar modern materials. Saimir Strati uses materials such as nails, toothpicks, corks, eggshells, CDs, coffee beans, porcelain and mirror glass to create mosaics.

In 2006, the Albanian artist began working on a kind of reproduction of Leonardo da Vinci's self-portrait. To create a canvas with an area of 2x4m, 400 kilograms of nails were used. The technique is reminiscent of digital photography, where each nail can be viewed as a pixel. The record was attested in Tirana and entered in the Guinness Book of Records on September 4, 2006, as the world's largest mosaic of nails.

The next year, the master became famous thanks to the second world record. In July 2007, 1 million 500 thousand toothpicks reproduced a huge figure of a running horse on a 4x2m canvas. The work was dedicated to the outstanding Spanish architect Antonio Gaudi. The author called his creation, on which he worked for 40 days, "Indomitable Spirit" - it symbolizes the flight of Gaudi's genius. On September 4, 2007, his work entered the Guinness Book of Records as the world's largest toothpick mosaic.

In 2008, another record was set for the creation of the world's largest cork mosaic. The artist Saimir Strati painstakingly worked on the canvas for 27 days, 14 hours a day, in a sultry Albanian summer under the scorching sun, gluing 229,764 wine corks of various sizes and colors onto a huge canvas in the garden of the Sheraton Tirana Hotel and Towers. The end product is a beautiful Mediterranean scene called Romeo with a crown of grapes, playing guitar and dancing with the sea and the sun. The picture turned out to be 2 floors high and almost 13 meters long.

We must pay tribute to the artist, who, using an unusual material, accurately managed to convey both the volume and play of light and shadow in all his masterpieces.