EXHIBITIONS

The work of Yasmina Nysten tends towards the face, portraits that combine large swathes of muted colour with quick swatches of unapologetic brightness. Her sensitivity to contrast plays out also in the wider environs of her paintings, including objects so casually yet carefully placed we cannot but imagine they have some specific meaning, a relation to the face beside them, the body resting, the shifted world the artist creates. Pattern, when used, is dedicated, honours the way the world can catch on a moment, the light can catch, the world becoming for a second all pattern, all flecks and small, shifting subtleties.  The world here divides into parts and pattern, more than light, brights and darks. There is a recognisable and an unrecognisable part, a clear brush stroke, a face formed from parts, what else forms a face except reality has no brush, or it is harder to see the strokes. In Nysten’s words these portraits ‘do not speak a language; rather, they teeter on the edge of a message. They offer only their ground: an absolute, silent being-there that confronts us at the very limit of what can be seen’.

Yasmina Alexandra Nysten is a Lebanese- Finnish artist based in Oregon. Born in 1988 in Helsinki and raised in Beirut, she earned a BFA from the Académie Libanaise des Beaux-Arts (ALBA) and an MFA in Digital Arts from Pratt Institute in New York.

Nysten’s early practice focused on the body through large-format paintings and works on paper. During her years living and exhibiting in New York, this work expanded to encompass urban environments, social narratives, and the dynamics of visibility and absence. Grounded in these experiences, her practice frequently bridges subcultural and global perspectives across both Middle Eastern and American artistic contexts.

Recently, working along the Pacific Coast in Oregon, Nysten has turned toward portraiture as a space to examine identity beyond literal likeness. Her figures balance material presence with atmospheric softness, acting as thresholds where interior states, ancestral memory, and environments overlap. Through a self-reflexive visual language, she continues to explore the human experience and its quieter, ethereal dimensions.