Nils Karsten

Black Flower, 2011
Graphite and collage on paper
30 x 22 inches (76.2 X 55.88 cm)

Courtesy of Nils Karsten and Ubu Gallery

Selected by Adam Boxer 

Nils Karsten is a German-born visual artist whose interdisciplinary practice explores cultural memory, translation, and the construction of meaning through relationships between images, materials, and objects. Working across drawing, collage, printmaking, painting, sculpture, and installation, he approaches making as a form of embodied thinking, where unexpected connections emerge through processes of collecting, arranging, and transforming visual fragments. Rather than illustrating fixed ideas, his work invites recognition, ambiguity, and multiple readings, allowing meaning to remain open and continually evolving.

Born in Hamburg, Germany, Karsten apprenticed as a cabinetmaker in Berlin before moving to New York in 1995. He received his BFA from the School of Visual Arts in 1999, his MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts in 2003, and participated in the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture.

Karsten's work has been exhibited widely throughout the United States, Europe, and Asia, including exhibitions at Pearl Lam Galleries in Hong Kong, the Pera Museum in Istanbul, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. His work is represented in numerous public and private collections, including the Brooklyn Museum, the Mint Museum, the Weatherspoon Art Museum, the Patricia & Phillip Frost Art Museum, and the Kuandu Museum of Fine Arts in Taipei.

An active educator as well as exhibiting artist, Karsten has taught drawing and painting at the School of Visual Arts for more than two decades. His teaching, like his studio practice, emphasizes curiosity, experimentation, and the discovery of meaning through sustained engagement with materials and process.

Karsten lives and works between Brooklyn and Callicoon, New York.