Frans Nybacka

Frans Nybacka’s practice centers on worldbuilding through painting. His heavily serial work combines poetic visual storytelling and imaginative juxtapositions that create a sense of mystery and layered complexity. In recent years, he has explored a morally and environmentally deteriorating world through the lens of childlike innocence, a perspective that lends even the heaviest themes a sense of gentleness and empathy.  

Nybacka repurposes overlooked and found imagery by personifying places, objects, and environments to reveal their emotional and magical presence. His exhibitions often resemble loose storyboards or stills from imagined video games, inviting viewers to construct their own narratives within the world he presents. The feverishly scraped, yet soft surfaces and faded palette are as characteristic as his compositions, that are purposefully flat in nature but contain multiple points of interest and pathways to dive into. Balancing chaos and ethereality, his paintings evoke a quiet melancholy, a sense of warm stillness, wistful, yet hopeful.

Frans Nybacka (b. 1993) is a Finnish artist who lives and works in Helsinki (FI). Nybacka's practice centers on world-building through painting. Recent exhibitions include Crisis Galore, Wings Petite at tm•galleria, Helsinki (FI), Borrowed Time at Pori Art Museum, Poriginal Gallery, Pori (FI), and Beyond Matter at Gaa Gallery, New York (US). Nybacka's work is represented in collections such as Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art and the Finnish National Gallery / State Art Deposit Collection. In 2026, he was awarded a working grant from the Finnish Cultural Foundation.