Noah Beyene | Making an Impression: Paris, France

The Bridge Gallery is delighted to present Making an Impression, the first solo exhibition of painter Noah Beyene (Sweden, 1993) at the gallery.

“Sweden is a nation of striking contradictions. Celebrated for its liberal ideals, social welfare, and cultural traditions, it is simultaneously grappling with the rise of the far-right Sweden Democrats, a party that has fuelled anti-immigrant sentiment. Noah Beyene was born to a Swedish mother and an Ethiopian father, and growing up in Stockholm, he never quite felt “Swedish enough”, a sense of displacement that informs the deeply reflective work presented in this exhibition. Making An Impression presents a series of oil paintings that explore identity, belonging, and memory through the physical act of imprinting. Beyene’s process is both meticulous and poetic: he photographs imprints of his body has made in the snow of northern Sweden and translates them onto canvas, layering the paint with reflective glass beads known as M beads. The result is a shimmering surface that shifts with the viewer’s perspective, capturing light in a way that recalls fresh snow under the Scandinavian sun.

The presence of absence reverberates throughout these works: the imprints of bodies functioning as negative space, the faint tracings of a silhouette standing in for a figure who is no longer there. These images approach the terrain of self-portraiture, yet they refuse the singularity the genre traditionally implies. Instead, they speak to a collective condition: a shared sense of not belonging and cultural ambiguity that exceeds any one individual body. In this way, the works become not portraits of a person but portraits of a feeling shaped by migration, mixed heritage, and the psychological terrain of growing up between cultural worlds.

The anonymity of the figures in these paintings, rendered as impressions rather than detailed portraits, further underscores Beyene’s meditation on identity. Form and presence take precedence over prescribed notions of race or nationality. In this, the works respond implicitly to the exclusionary logic of Sweden’s recently announced cultural canon: a curated list of 100 works, ideas, and brands deemed essential to Swedishness, restricted to works over fifty years old, and largely excluding artists of colour. Beyene’s paintings stand in contrast to this state-sanctioned vision of culture, embodying instead the complex and subjective nature of nationhood and belonging. The L’Inconnue de la Seine, or ‘Unknown Woman of the Seine’, was a source of inspiration for Beyene. An unidentified young woman, her serene death mask became one of the most reproduced images in early 20th-century Europe. Pulled from the Seine in the late 19th century, she was rumoured to have died by suicide, though her true story remains unknown. Her face, with its faint, enigmatic smile and unnervingly peaceful expression, inspired writers, artists, and actors, becoming a symbol of idealised beauty, and celebrated precisely because she had no identity. This idea of an anonymous imprint preserved in time resonates directly with Beyene’s own practice. He describes the plaster “death masks” he made in the snow as physical manifestations of the paintings on the wall, as ephemeral impressions given form. In Beyene’s hands, the imprint becomes both evidence and metaphor: an index of a body and a reminder of how easily bodies slip outside the narratives nations construct for them. 

His paintings reject the fixed identities implied by cultural canons, instead inhabiting the unsettled spaces where belonging must be continually renegotiated. What does it mean to belong to a place that struggles to recognise you? And what forms of identity emerge when presence is registered only through its trace? Beyene offers no definitive answers; rather, he creates a terrain where these questions can be felt quietly, and without closure. In the shifting glow of these works, belonging appears provisional, porous and open. Perhaps, like a footprint in snow or the serene face of the Unknown Woman of the Seine, identity is less a fixed outline than an invitation: to look closer, to rethink what we inherit, and to imagine what might take shape in the spaces left behind.”

Text by Sofia Hallstrom