Nina Roos is an internationally renowned painter and one of the leading Nordic artists of her generation. She represented Finland at the Venice Biennale in 1995, had large retrospective exhibitions at Kiasma in Helsinki in 2001 and at Malmö Konsthall in 2003 and was Professor of Painting at Uniarts Helsinki’s Academy of Fine Arts in 2001–2004. She also had solo exhibitions at Moderna Museet in Stockholm in 2009 and at Lunds konsthall in 2019.

Celebrated for her uncompromising commitment to her fluid but demanding medium, Roos has long insisted that painting be seen as a system of thought, in particular spatial thought, and as a vehicle for new ideas. She is known – not least by her students at the Malmö Art Academy in Sweden – as a dedicated experimentalist, fully invested in articulating the particular values of painting and, if necessary, explaining how they help us understand the agonised age of the mediatised image:

‘When painting is read as if it were the same as mediatised images, it really becomes impossible to relate to painting.’