About
Mathias Kessler (b. 1968, Austria) is a New York–based artist whose work critically reimagines nature through photography, installation, and digital media. Referencing art history, philosophy, and ecological politics, he creates provocative juxtapositions—icebergs staged like movie sets, coral-covered skulls, or romantic landscapes in beer fridges. His practice destabilizes binaries such as nature/culture or aesthetics/ideology with wit and gravity. Kessler holds an MFA from SVA and has exhibited internationally at institutions including Kunsthal Rotterdam, Kunsthaus Graz, and Columbus Museum of Art. His work appears in major publications including The New York Times, Die Zeit, Camera Austria, and Kunstforum International.
Statement
At the core of Mathias Kessler’s work is an inquiry into the natural world as a contemporary social process. Through photography, installation, and performance he negotiates the definition and interpretation of the relationship of human societies and economic interests to the world and its natural resources.
Growing up in an Austrian ski resort town, Kessler felt throughout his childhood he was “growing up on someone else’s holiday.” Within this constructed environment, he witnessed from a young age the nuances of nature’s transformation through human intervention. As an artist, Kessler approaches this classic “nature vs. culture” dynamic as an indicator of the acceleration and expansion of industry and its toll on both human and natural resources. Accordingly, his images of nature are not merely representations of landscapes, but visualizations of the confluence of (often conflicting) political, economic, and ecological interests by which they are produced.
Positioning himself within the legacy of the Romantic landscape tradition, Kessler works through the conventional aesthetics that inform its values. While representations of nature have become increasingly realistic, facilitated by photography and digital editing software, the Romantic ideal, expressed symbolically in painting, remains the central conceit, both in naturalist landscape photography and in the world of commodities.
Between documentary research, social sculpture, and Romantic aesthetics, Kessler adopts such quintessential 19th-century methods of inquiry as the expedition and empirical research: manifestations of an unquenchable desire for the undiscovered, the sublime, the fantasy made real. He encourages a direct encounter with the often harsh realities under the surface of these romanticized forays into the unknown—and in many cases, the misunderstood.
“I want to provide a platform where one can experience something,” Kessler insists. As viewers and participants orient themselves within the framework he provides, they activate the work as a collective process: it is precisely in these digressions into discourse or physical reactions, cracks and disruptions of the basic structure, that the collective artwork is produced.