Written by Liam Sibaii

Yasmina Alexandra Nysten is a Finnish-Lebanese artist, born in 1988 in Helsinki, Finland, to a Lebanese mother and a Finnish father. From an early age, she recognized that making art felt unlike anything else she did. She began taking painting classes at age seven and immediately gravitated towards art. It was a distinct, intuitive form of expression. At twelve, she moved to Beirut, where the change in environment proved fruitful for her artistic development.

At fifteen, Nysten exhibited for the first time in the 2003 show Shu Tabkha Ya Mara in Beirut, marking an early entry into the local art scene. The painting she presented depicted a scene suggestive of physical intimacy between two human figures, a motif that would become a recurring concern throughout her career. Many of the other works in the exhibition were collaborative pieces between writers and poets, featuring handwritten text directly on the canvas. This interweaving of language and image left a lasting impression on Nysten, whose later practice would repeatedly return to this fusion of visual and verbal form.

While continuing to exhibit throughout her teenage years, Nysten chose to pursue art formally. She earned a Bachelor’s degree in Fine Art from the Académie Libanaise des Beaux-Arts (ALBA) in 2009. That same year, she relocated to the United States and held her first solo exhibition, The 7 Minute Special, in New York City¹. This series marked the emergence of her interest in anthropomorphic figures—often painted with large heads and nude forms, rendered in a restrained palette of browns and greys. Though centered on the human body, her approach was never photographic or anatomically precise. In an untitled painting from the series, for example, multiple nude figures with oversized heads overlap in ways that blur anatomical boundaries. It becomes difficult to tell where one figure ends and another begins, or whether a given form is a breast or an eyeball.

In pursuit of new visual tools, Nysten enrolled in a Master’s program in 3D Animation at Pratt Institute in New York, graduating in 2012. She began working professionally in animation shortly after, but quickly found the industry’s structure creatively stifling. While the medium held technical elegance, commercial work often reduced her role to executing the visions of others, leaving little room for exploration or authorship.

Following this period, Nysten withdrew from public exhibitions. In the mid to late 2010s, she entered a phase of inward retreat—still painting, but privately. These years became a laboratory of experimentation and reflection, laying the groundwork for her artistic re-emergence. In 2023, she returned to the public eye with Bosta, a collaborative exhibition with painter Morrison Pierce at the Mark Hachem Gallery². The series, described by Nysten as a collection of “art crimes,” reconnected her to her roots in image and text. Paintings from this show featured handwritten words and phrases as integral parts of the composition, reflecting her belief that the relationship between words and visual form is “just the perfect combination”, as words and images together can amplify meaning in a way that neither can achieve alone.

Nysten’s use of language is partly inspired by her admiration for Jean-Michel Basquiat, the influential American artist known for his raw, expressive works that fused text, symbolism, and abstracted figures. Rising to prominence in the 1980s, Basquiat’s paintings tackled themes of race, identity, and power, often through a visual language that blurred the lines between street art and fine art. Like Basquiat, Nysten incorporates text and fragmented thoughts into her paintings. Yet, where his language was rooted in American pop culture, Nysten draws from both Arabic and English. 

This interplay of language and image comes into sharp focus in several of her works from 2022, where words are not just inserted but embedded into the very logic of the composition. Cellar Door, 2022, part of the Ramzi and Saeda Dalloul Art Foundation’s collection, exemplifies Nysten’s approach. The painting is a chaotic, multi-layered composition that fuses text, figuration, and symbolic debris in an explosion of mark-making. The phrase “listen to mother” is scrawled in Arabic in the upper right, hovering beside a fragmented blue face with a stitched-up jaw. Around it, disjointed motifs of planes, factories, bones, and toy animals circulate with frenetic energy. The word “GOLD” appears on a blue box near the bottom right, a label that echoes both sentimentality and consumer packaging. The work resists linear interpretation, operating instead as a fevered collage of memory, media, and domestic suggestion.

In Birthday Manual, 2022, language becomes even more dominant. Amid a cacophony of brightly colored blocks, distorted faces, and cartoonish figures, speech bubbles erupt with phrases like “WILLIAM TELL” – the famed swiss archer³ – “Bread,” “Jesus Saves,” and “WATER.” At the center stands a suit-clad male figure with deer antlers, his eyes look downward in apparent detachment or exhaustion. The composition is a swarm of references, from protest signs and roadside scenes to biblical and folkloric fragments, stitched together in a way that feels both manic and deliberate. Meaning is built through overload, as if the canvas itself is overrun by input.

This compositional density, where meaning comes from accumulation rather than clarity, continues in other key works. In Drive By / Drive Through, 2023, and the earlier Cellar Door, 2020, the canvas is similarly packed with mask-like faces, floating symbols, and fragmented bodies. These pieces echo Basquiat’s influence in their visual urgency⁴, but Nysten’s figures are distinctly her own, often on the verge of unraveling.

Nysten’s figures seem flayed and raw, conveying vulnerability through abstraction rather than anatomical precision.⁵ Heads are skeletal or split open, jaws are stitched or disjointed, limbs blend into landscape. Her figures seem less like subjects and more like accumulations of feeling, memory, or atmosphere. The body becomes a site of psychic and symbolic density, where emotion is mapped not through gesture alone, but through rupture. Content is distributed across the canvas, encouraging viewers to search for visual thrills in every crevasse.⁶

In recent years, another consistent thread has emerged in Nysten’s work: her growing emphasis on color. In contrast to the subdued, earthy palette of her earlier series The 7 Minute Special, her recent paintings often erupt in chromatic intensity. More recently, she has resisted limiting herself to a set palette, often wanting to use “all the colors.”. Color, for Nysten, is no longer just an aesthetic choice. It becomes a perceptual concern, a way of seeing and thinking.

This approach is fully realized in her 2023 series South Pole Contemporary⁷ and Black Market⁸, where she explores not only an expansive spectrum of hues, but also a meticulous treatment of how color behaves. In works like The Coverts, 2023, Sandlot, 2024, and Tiny and Rat, 2023, which are all part of the Ramzi and Saeda Dalloul Art Foundation’s collection, color appears in detailed gradients that shift subtly within the smallest areas of the canvas. One shade folds into another, capturing the nuance of lived surfaces and perceptual experience. The effect is often dazzling, but it is also intimate. Nysten uses this chromatic intricacy not to dazzle for its own sake, but to heighten the emotional weight of her scenes.

In Sandlot, the embrace of two figures is imbued with warmth and tension; in The Coverts, four men huddle in coded proximity, cloaked in trench coats and secrecy. Each composition, however vivid, remains grounded in human intimacy, whether familial, social, or psychological. Through color, Nysten explores the spaces between bodies and feelings, perception and memory, visibility and concealment.

Today, Yasmina Alexandra Nysten lives and works in Astoria, Oregon, where she is developing a new body of paintings based on her ongoing exploration of perception, intimacy, and color, while the human figure remains central to her practice. Nysten’s work continues to appear in exhibitions across the Pacific Northwest and internationally.

Edited by Elsie Labban

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Notes

¹ Yasmina Nysten, “The 7-Minute Special,” Yasmina Nysten, accessed July 7, 2025, https://yasminanysten.com/the-7-minute-special.

² Yasmina Nysten, “Bosta,” Yasmina Nysten, accessed July 7, 2025, https://yasminanysten.com/bosta.

³ EBSCO, “William Tell (Folk Hero),” EBSCO Research Starters: History, accessed July 8, 2025, https://www.ebsco.com/research-starters/history/william-tell-folk-hero.

⁴ Artsy, “Allover Composition,” Artsy, accessed July 8, 2025, https://www.artsy.net/gene/allover-composition.

⁵ Cécile Martet, “Canvassing the Masterpieces: Skull by Basquiat,” Rise Art, August 22, 2023, accessed July 8, 2025, https://www.riseart.com/article/2706/canvassing-the-masterpieces-skull-by-basquiat?srsltid=AfmBOoqRuqP_8VuqUxqliBXjlB09nAgBBkgFhTuv2p1P1xePrqzeyUce&utm_source=chatgpt.com.

⁶ Artspeak NYC, “JeanMichel Basquiat,” Artspeak NYC, accessed July 8, 2025, https://www.artspeak.nyc/home/jean-michel-basquiat.

⁷ Yasmina Nysten, “South Pole,” Yasmina Nysten, accessed July 7, 2025, https://yasminanysten.com/south-pole.

⁸ Yasmina Nysten, “Black Market,” Yasmina Nysten, accessed July 7, 2025, https://yasminanysten.com/black-market.

Bibliography

Artsy. “Allover Composition.” Artsy. Accessed July 8, 2025. https://www.artsy.net/gene/allover-composition.

Artspeak NYC. “JeanMichel Basquiat.” Artspeak NYC. Accessed July 8, 2025. https://www.artspeak.nyc/home/jean-michel-basquiat.

EBSCO. “William Tell (Folk Hero).” EBSCO Research Starters: History. Accessed July 8, 2025. https://www.ebsco.com/research-starters/history/william-tell-folk-hero.

Martet, Cécile. “Canvassing the Masterpieces: Skull by Basquiat.” Rise Art, August 22, 2023. Accessed July 8, 2025. https://www.riseart.com/article/2706/canvassing-the-masterpieces-skull-by-basquiat.

Nysten, Yasmina. “Black Market.” Yasmina Nysten. Accessed July 7, 2025. https://yasminanysten.com/black-market.

 “The 7-Minute Special.” Yasmina Nysten. Accessed July 7, 2025. https://yasminanysten.com/the-7-minute-special.

 “Bosta.” Yasmina Nysten. Accessed July 7, 2025. https://yasminanysten.com/bosta.

 “South Pole.” Yasmina Nysten. Accessed July 7, 2025. https://yasminanysten.com/south-pole.

Sibai, Liam. Interview with Yasmina Alexandra Nysten. Ramzi and Saeda Dalloul Art Foundation, July 5, 2025. Unpublished.