Kristina Nagel

Kristina Nagel (Frankfurt am Main, DE) is a contemporary artist whose primary medium is photography. She develops her own logic of perception, presence, and form within image systems. Central to her practice is depersonalization: through the formal decoupling of identifiable features, spaces emerge between recognizability and indeterminacy, in which the effect of the image can be experienced independently of individual identity. Bodies become structural elements in which skin, gestures, and posture appear in relation to material, environment, and abstraction. Figures are fragmented, faces anonymized or withdrawn, and bodies arranged in compositions that make proximity, distance, and presence simultaneously perceptible. Materials such as leather function as structuring elements, generating tension between object and subject as well as surface and space, and directing perception toward form, line, and texture. Photography thus becomes a tool that renders the relationship between body, material, and image visible and challenges perception as an autonomous experience.

The artist has presented solo exhibitions at Gratin, New York (2025) and FRAGILE, Berlin (2023). Her work has been shown in group exhibitions, among others, at Gwangju Biennale (2026), Espace Niemeyer, Paris (2025), Simian, Copenhagen (2025), as well as at St. Matthäus Church at the Kulturforum as part of Berlin Art Week (2025). Working as an interdisciplinary photographer, she is currently developing a book project on the USER body of work, which further expands and contextualizes its conceptual framework.