Artist’s 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. Her figurative series centers on children at play. Focussed on their inner reality, children play to make sense of the world. Through their interactions with children, adults seek to pass on inherited skills, knowledge, and wisdom— often imperfectly. Moments of play evoke the sense of time, and the strong emotions associated with its passage. Nagel’s cityscapes likewise seek to capture both inner and outer landscapes. By hovering between abstraction and realism, they seek to make a subjective experience visible, something that can be communicated and passed on. Beginning by capturing evocative moments through sketches and photographs, Nagel 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.
Nagel has pursued her artistic education while training and working as a professional scientist. She studied printmaking and watercolor at City College, San Francisco, and exhibited and sold her work through Cambridge Open Studios in Cambridge MA from 2009-2014. Nagel moved to New York in 2014, where she has studied printmaking at Manhattan Graphics and painting with Liz Marrafino while running a research lab at NYU School of Medicine.