Katherine Nagel

 

Artist Statement


Katherine Nagel is a painter and printmaker based in New York City. Her work explores themes of play and discovery, parents and children, time and inheritance.  Nagel’s figurative series centers on children and parents.  For children, play is not frivolous but purposeful.  Focussed on their inner reality, children play to make sense of the world.  Through their interactions with children, parents seek to pass on what they have inherited— often without fully understanding it themselves.  Moments of interaction between parents and children evoke the passage of time.  Nagel’s cityscapes likewise evoke both inner and outer landscapes.  Ranging from joyous and playful to solitary and brooding, they depict an inner world as reflected in an outward arrangement of colors and shapes.  By hovering between abstraction and realism, they seek to make a subjective experience visible, something that can be communicated and passed on.

 

Nagel begins by capturing images through sketches and photographs. Working from life, her subjects are mostly her own children, family, and environment. Her style is loose with bold strokes and a vibrant color sensibility meant to evoke a feeling of discovery. She is inspired by modernist painters such as Kandinsky, Hodler, and Diebenkorn that played with the border between representation, abstraction, and symbolism in vivid colors.  Though her works are carefully planned and composed, she aims to give each finished piece the immediacy of a sketch.  www.KatherineNagel.com


Biography


Katherine Nagel has pursued her artistic education alongside her career as a professional scientist. She studied printmaking and watercolor at City College of San Francisco and exhibited and sold her work through Cambridge Open Studios in Cambridge, Massachusetts, from 2009 to 2014.

After moving to New York in 2014, Nagel continued her artistic training, studying printmaking at Manhattan Graphics Center and the Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts, and painting with Liz Marrafino. She began exhibiting her work professionally in 2023.