Nadia Kissel/ Spring Issue

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).

This work considers landscape as memory rather than location. Inspired by my travel to Kenya, the paintings respond to vast spaces, shifting light, and strong chromatic contrasts found in open savannahs and the Rift Valley horizons.

Over time, the observed landscape has been reduced to essential visual structures. The early compositions of Shapes began with overlapping, playful forms before evolving into simplified linear and spatial rhythms. This process was later presented under the title Horizon Escapes.

The series is also informed by Maasai visual culture, particularly the colour rhythms and suspended linear forms found in traditional beadwork and adornment. These patterns become a language for translating landscape into abstraction. The work shifts the landscape from vertical observation to horizontal experience. Saturated, fluid colours float across the surface, evoking atmosphere, movement, and emotional resonance rather than physical geography. Between abstraction and landscape, the paintings function as spaces of perception, memory, and colour.