Nadia Kissel/ Portraits

Nadia Kissel’s artistic journey began in Russia, where she trained from the age of fourteen at the Ryazan College of Art and later at the Leningrad Academy. Grounded in the classical traditions of drawing and composition, her practice has since evolved across cultures and continents. A move to Kenya marked a transformative chapter, immersing her in the vibrant textures of African life and expanding her visual language through bold colour and dynamic contrasts. Later, in the United Kingdom, Kissel’s work became increasingly concept-driven, exploring themes of identity, belonging, and displacement through series such as Stripped, Bags and Boxed, and Post Card From….Kissel completed her MFA with distinction at Birmingham City University in 2016, receiving first prize for Stripped, later exhibited at the 2019 Venice Biennale (Personal Structures: Identities, European Cultural Centre).

Working through a series-based, conceptually rigorous approach to painting, Kissel continues to explore memory, material, and shifting notions of identity. Her work is held in private and public collections internationally. For Kissel, art remains an evolving conversation between past and present, self and place, a way of mapping experience through the language of form and idea.

The Doll’s House series draws upon the historical genre of the tronie, a mode of representation concerned with typology, expression, and affect rather than individual likeness. Once integral to artistic practice, the tronie was gradually subsumed by portraiture and subsequently marginalised within art historical narratives. Johannes Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring stands as one of its most frequently cited examples.

Referencing contemporary fashion imagery, these works occupy an ambiguous space between realism and artifice. Through their deliberately fragmentary, sketch-like execution and unresolved surfaces, the images interrogate the aesthetics of glamour, the commodification of youth, and the construction of normative beauty codes. The refusal of finish operates conceptually, destabilising expectations of completeness and perfection, and prompting reflection on the mechanisms through which visual desire is produced and sustained.