Matias Faldbakken

Matias Faldbakken was born on 20 November 1973 in Hobro, Denmark, and grew up in Hamar, Norway. He is the son of the Norwegian novelist Knut Faldbakken and the ceramist Gro Honore Skaltveit, and the brother of film director Stefan Faldbakken. He trained as a visual artist at Vestlandets Kunstakademi (the Academy of Fine Art) in Bergen from 1994 to 1998, with an overlapping year, 1996 to 1997, at the Stadelschule in Frankfurt am Main under Professor Thomas Bayrle.

Faldbakken has sustained two distinct but overlapping bodies of work. As a visual artist, he sources and reworks images and materials from advertising, literature, art history, and pop culture, altering and deconstructing mass-produced objects into abstract paintings, sculptures, and installations across painting, drawing, sculpture, and video. As a writer, he published his first three novels, including The Cocka Hola Company and Unfun, under the pseudonym Abo Rasul, a trilogy later described by his literary agency as the Scandinavian Misanthropy trilogy. He began publishing under his own name in the 2010s, and his novel Vi er fem was shortlisted for the Nordic Council Literature Prize in 2020.

He represented Norway in the Nordic Pavilion at the 2005 Venice Biennale and participated in Documenta 13 in Kassel in 2012, two of the most significant markers of international art-world recognition available to a living artist. He lives and works in Oslo, Norway.

Faldbakken's work is most often discussed in terms of its treatment of everyday, mass-produced materials, garbage bags, shutters, advertising imagery, industrial hardware, which he alters and deconstructs into abstract paintings and sculptures. Curators and gallery texts consistently frame this practice as applying the conventional tools of art-making to ordinary objects until they register as formal abstraction while still carrying the residue of their commercial origin. His dual career as a novelist, first under the pseudonym Abo Rasul and later under his own name, is frequently cited alongside the visual work as part of a single, consistent interest in provocation, consumer culture, and social mores. His inclusion in the Nordic Pavilion at the 2005 Venice Biennale and in Documenta 13 in 2012 are treated in institutional biographies as the clearest markers of his standing within contemporary art.

Faldbakken is represented by an unusually strong roster of galleries for a market of his current size, including Paula Cooper Gallery in New York, Galerie Eva Presenhuber in Zurich and Vienna, Standard in Oslo, Galerie Neu in Berlin, and Simon Lee Gallery in London. That gallery network, together with a 2017 to 2018 survey at the Astrup Fearnley Museet in Oslo and inclusion in major public and corporate collections, points to sustained primary-market demand and institutional interest.

Public auction data for Faldbakken is thin and, as of this writing, no single sale can be confirmed as his all-time auction record with a verified price, currency, house, and date across the sources available. Collectors should treat any auction-price claim for this artist with caution until it can be corroborated against an auction house's own sale archive.

There is no catalogue raisonne for Faldbakken, and no authentication protocol is documented in the sources reviewed for this profile; provenance and attribution should be confirmed directly with his representing galleries. His market is best understood through institutional signals, biennial and Documenta participation, a museum survey at the Astrup Fearnley Museet, and placement in major public collections, rather than through auction history, which remains sparse and not reliably documented at this time. Given his simultaneous, well-established career as a novelist, collectors should also be careful to distinguish sources that discuss his literary work from those documenting his visual-art market.