Nadia Kissel/ Women Art

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.

Since my student years, drawing from female models has been central to my practice. Over time, this engagement has developed into a socio-political inquiry into power and gender. I examine not only the female body, but also how it has been historically framed in art. The ongoing series Woman Looking… proposes an alternative image of women—figures who resist the traditionally passive role of the nude and instead appear self-aware, confident, and at ease in their nudity.

The series challenges the “male gaze” that has shaped representations of the female body for centuries. Painted from a woman’s perspective, these works reject objectification and reaffirm the subject’s agency. The figures are not posed for display; they appear active, reflective, and present.

Influenced by Siri Hustvedt’s Woman Looking at Men Looking at Women, my work brings gender into direct dialogue with painting and drawing. It asks: How do we see? Who is looking—and from which position? In this way, the act of observing the nude becomes a critical space where representation, identity, and power intersect.