Artist in Residence at Spazio Sassetti, Florence, Italy, November 2025
Created during her residency in Florence, Fransson’s work arises from sustained encounters with the city’s devotional
spaces—Santa Maria Novella, San Marco, and the fresco cycles that shape their architecture. Fransson draws not from
depiction but from structure: partitioned panels, quiet geometries, and the sense of multiple worlds held in parallel.
The series is equally informed by the limits of the body, in particular a bad case of the flu that Fransson suffered from
whilst in Florence. Running parallel to this spiritual architecture is the physical reality of sickness. Fransson’s paintings
carry both beauty and strain—soft surfaces born from a body under attack. While ill with a high fever, Fransson read
Dante, and his layered cosmologies—Paradiso, Purgatory, Hell—entered the work as tonal conditions rather than
narrative destinations. Color becomes an atmosphere: greens that open, reds that constrict, pale hues that recede into
vapor. Forms meet, disperse, and press against one another, recalling the density of early frescoes in which bodies
accumulate without hierarchy. Murmurs of color echo Judgment Day frescoes, where bodies swarm without
perspective, collapsing into a single restless mass.
Working with pigments mixed by hand, shifting between egg tempera and oil, Fransson creates surfaces that hold both
clarity and drift. The paintings function as fractured interiors—segments, thresholds, and soft ruptures—where
emotional, spatial, and bodily states coexist within a single frame.
Pauline Fransson (b. 1990) is a Swedish artist living and working in Nybro (SE). In 2021, she graduated from The
Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts with an MFA. Fransson is represented in the collections of the Public Art Agency
Sweden, the art association of the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, Kalmar Art Museum, Region Kronoberg, and
the County Council in Region Kalmar, among others.
Spazio Sassetti, November 2025 - February 2026, Florence, IT
