Kerstin Brätsch


Kerstin Brätsch is a German contemporary visual artist. She is primarily known as a painter, also making work collaboratively as DAS INSTITUT and KAYA. She currently lives and works in New York City.

Early life and education

Brätsch was born in 1979 in Hamburg, Germany. She received a Masters in Fine Arts from Columbia University in New York City.

Career

Brätsch is a painter, who often creates large-scale, highly abstract works that combine multiple medias. Though Brätsch's abstract works might visually call to mind artists such as Vasilly Kandinsky, she bucks against tradition in the unusual display of her works. For instance, her paintings have been hung by magnets, draped, and framed in between sheets of glass and then leaned against the wall, which combines an element of exhibition display and performance to her artistic practice.
Brätsch is also known for working quickly and producing large quantities of work. In 2007 Brätsch formed DAS INSTITUT with fellow artist Adele Röder. Using a traditional import and export agency as a model, DAS INSTITUT seeks to examine how images are disseminated, exchanged, and produced in today's world. These collaborations often produce work that combine Brätsch's paintings with Röder's digital projections, posters, and advertisements. Though Brätsch and Röder are the primary artists involved, DAS INSTITUT also collaborates with other artists.
Her other frequent collaborator is sculptor Debo Eilers, with whom she makes work as KAYA. This alter-ego is "an ongoing project with their muse and collaborator Kaya, a teen girl who is the daughter of one of Eilers’s childhood friends from Texas. Brätsch and Eilers have been working with Kaya since she was 14, in the process encouraging her to develop as an artist herself.

Recognition

In 2014, Brätsch was awarded the August Macke Prize.
In 2017, Brätsch was awarded the second edition of the Edvard Munch Art Award, which constituted a cash prize and a solo exhibition at the Munch Museum in 2019.

Art market

Brätsch has been represented by Gladstone Gallery since 2020. She previously worked with Gavin Brown's Enterprise.

Major exhibitions