Blerta Hashani (b. 1997, Ferizaj, Kosovo) lives and works in Mirash, Kosovo, where the landscapes of her birthplace continue to shape her practice across painting, drawing, and photography. Her work draws from the rhythms and textures of rural life, juxtaposing expressive depictions of animals, vegetation, and everyday objects with abstract, intuitive forms. Through this poetic visual language, Hashani explores themes of memory, place, and belonging.

After completing her studies at the Faculty of Arts, University of Pristina (2015–2020), Hashani began developing a body of work that situates intimate, often small-scale paintings within a broader dialogue about rural life, mysticism, and the transformation of the ordinary. Her paintings often appear deceptively simple, yet each carries a subtle resonance: blood-orange suns, snails, puffs of forest, and fragments of handwriting imbue her work with quiet energy and a contemplative, almost ritualistic sensibility.

Hashani’s commitment to exploring both local and international contexts has been strengthened through residencies at the Milvus Artistic Research Center in Sweden and Kulturpunkt PROGR in Switzerland (2024), where she furthered her engagement with rural memory, sitespecific practice, and collaborative projects. Her first artist publication, A Story upon the Green (2024), documents her site-specific work for the Old Mill in Mirash, reflecting her attention to the interweaving of landscape and history.

Her solo exhibitions trace a steady progression of recognition, from early presentations in Pristina to those abroad. Recent highlights include Cicërimat në Mjegull at ARKIV – Institute of Contemporary Art, Peja (2025), Memorizonim at LambdaLambdaLambda, Pristina (2024), and Known/Unknown Worlds at Kulturpunkt PROGR, Bern (2024). Hashani has also been an active participant in group exhibitions that situate her work within contemporary Balkan and international painting trends. Notable presentations include Silent Threads Resounding Kosova at Galleria Continua, Paris (2025), Perceive, Record, Imagine at Foundation 17, Pristina (2025), and Jahresgaben at Bonner Kunstverein, Bonn (2024). Earlier exhibitions, such as her participation in Manifesta 14 (2022), established her presence within critical discourses on rural representation, abstraction, and contemporary painting. Blerta Hashani’s oeuvre demonstrates a keen sensitivity to scale, intimacy, and poetic resonance.

Her practice bridges local memory and global contemporary art, marking her as a significant voice among emerging Kosovar artists, and situating her work within broader dialogues around pastoral minimalism, mystical symbolism, and the transformation of everyday experience into painting. As Hashani continues to exhibit internationally, her trajectory points toward increasing recognition on the global stage. Upcoming solo and group projects promise to further explore her meditative engagement with rural space, while consolidating her reputation as a poet of place, memory, and landscape in contemporary painting.

Blerta Hashani’s practice has increasingly found resonance beyond Kosovo, positioning her among a generation of young painters who are renewing the language of contemporary painting. Selected by Art Basel as one of the young painters to keep an eye on, Hashani embodies the quiet persistence of a medium that continues to evolve in the digital age. As writer Rob Goyanes noted, painting today flourishes through artists who find poetry in restraint, those who transform the everyday into something contemplative and enduring. Hashani’s pastoral minimalism belongs to this current: attentive to small gestures, sensitive to rhythm, and profoundly attuned to the living textures of place.

Her international visibility has expanded through exhibitions such as Known/Unknown Worlds at Kulturpunkt PROGR in Bern, feel more at La Maison de Rendez-Vous in Brussels, and group presentations at Galleria Continua in Paris and Bonner Kunstverein. These platforms have highlighted the quiet universality of her vision, where fragments of rural Kosovo unfold into meditations on belonging, memory, and transformation.

In this broader dialogue, her work resonates alongside painters such as Libasse Ka, Liza Lacroix, and Roméo Mivekannin. These are all the artists who each, in their own way, reimagine the emotional and material possibilities of painting. Yet Hashani’s voice remains singular, rooted in the specificity of her surroundings while open to cross-cultural exchange through residencies in Sweden and Switzerland. It is this interplay of intimacy and openness that has earned her a place on Art Basel’s list of 10 newcomers to discover.

Roughly 25 kilometers from Pristina, in the village of Mirash, Blerta Hashani’s studio sits at the heart of the landscape that inspires her work. Visiting her studio is like stepping into the lived environment behind her paintings: hills, farmland, and the gentle rhythms of rural life form both backdrop and subject for her work.

Hashani’s rootedness in her village is further exemplified by her sitespecific exhibition, A Story upon the Green (2024), held at a 100-year-old mill near her family home. Curated by New Yorker Alex Fisher for the pan-European nomadic festival Manifesta, the exhibition transformed the mill and surrounding pasture into a living setting for her small-scale, intimate works. Villagers and visitors from Pristina gathered, blending local hospitality with the international art context. Artworks were placed among the mill’s stone walls and nearby forest, creating a dialogue between art and landscape, past and present.

In her rural studio, Hashani’s practice is inseparable from place. Here, the quiet of the Kosovo countryside, the textures of her family’s property, and the rhythms of everyday life come together to form her pictorial vision. It is a vision that is simultaneously intimate, local, while engaging with the global contemporary art stage.

Blerta Hashani is part of a circle of young Kosovar artists who transformed a long-vacant space in Pristina’s Palace of Youth and Sports into a shared studio. Alongside Arbnor Karaliti, Lumturie Krasniqi, Mimoza Sahiti, Ermir Zhinipotoku, and Valdrin Thaqi, Hashani experimented with painting, materials, and conceptual approaches, fostering a rare environment of collaboration and mutual support. Their collective approach is striking in a European context, where young artists typically navigate highly competitive, individualistic paths.

Historically, such collectives were common and highly valued in art history, both for the cross-pollination of ideas and for their appeal to collectors. Today, examples of this kind of sustained, collaborative artistic community are exceptionally rare, making their work all the more significant.

Hashani’s intimate works invite collectors and institutions alike to engage with a practice that bridges pastoral landscapes with the global contemporary stage, creating an art built on care and the enduring relevance of painting itself.