Albert Brahaj: The Goose, the Gaze, and the Ordinary Made Odd

There is a child on a sofa, reading a book called The White Goose. A goose has just wandered in through the door. Neither of them seems particularly alarmed by the other.

That is the first thing. The scene is so ordinary, so recognizably domestic, and so still, that you lean in. And then you keep looking. And the longer you look, the stranger it becomes.

This is precisely where Albert Brahaj wants you. In that threshold between the familiar and the quietly unsettling, between a scene you think you recognize and one that slowly refuses to resolve itself into anything certain.

Images of Thinking

Brahaj, who was born and trained in Albania and now lives and works in Cologne, describes his paintings not as images of his life, but as images of his thinking: of sensations, not events.

“(They) are no images of my life story,” he writes, “but images of my feelings of life, which have nothing to do with concretely experienced situations.” What he reaches for, instead, is ambiguity: the undecided zone where art lives. Quiet content in cheerful colors. Absurd, metaphysical, or surreal realities in the costume of the everyday.

You feel this tension the moment color enters his work. His palette is soft: pastel greens, pinks, and powder blues washed across floral sofas and ornate facades, often punctuated by sudden, insistent notes of red and gold. An axiomatic goose that bursts into flame-orange and takes flight. Shoes painted with roses. A rose, a shoe, a shock of blue sky. These are not decorative choices. They are emotional ones, the places in the composition where feeling surfaces, where something demands to be felt rather than simply seen.

The graphite drawings work differently, and just as powerfully. Rendered in silver and gray, they feel like memories that have lost their color: dreams still present, still structurally intact, but faded. A child’s bedroom. A room full of geese pressing against the glass. A framed photograph on the wall. Everything is there; yet nothing is certain.

Leitmotifs and the Layered Scene

Across his work, certain figures keep returning. The goose, white, orange, flower-adorned, sometimes serene, sometimes mid-flight and ferocious, appears again and again, a creature that belongs and doesn’t belong, domestic and wild at once.

A man in a floral sweater looks upward, slightly off-balance, as if caught between gravity and something calling him elsewhere. Children read, observe, and exist in their own quiet awareness. Shoes become paintings. Floors become chessboards that buckle and ripple like the logic of a dream.

Brahaj is a rigorous composer. He writes of eliminating everything routine from the picture, reducing it, and focusing only on what matters: building what he calls a color architecture through complementary contrasts and analogous harmonies.

His training in Albania gave him the draughtsman’s discipline that underpins even his most colorful canvases; the graphite works, with their meticulous spatial construction and softly atmospheric shading, reveal an artist for whom drawing is not preparation but practice in its own right.

What results is a body of work that one Albanian professor, writing about these very paintings, described as the “evacuation of action” – scenes not abandoned, but suspended. The people in Brahaj’s world are not about to leave. They have simply paused, without intention, in a moment that has no before or after.

Albert Brahaj at the Discovery Art Fair Cologne 2026

Albert Brahaj will present his work at the upcoming Discovery Art Fair in Cologne, from April 23-26, 2026.
Come and spend time with these paintings. Let the ordinariness pull you in first. They will keep you looking far longer than you planned.

Featured image: Albert Brahaj – Empty Reality. Courtesy the artist.