Painting New Realities

When Charles Saatchi bought her whole graduation show at the RCA back in 2003, South Africa-born Natasha Kissell was just 25. Her latest show at London's Eleven gallery mixes retro 60s ideas of utopia with the aesthetics of the American sublime painters of the 19th century, topped off with a Disney-esque color palette. Humorously borrowing its title from Baudelaire's “Artificial Paradises” —a prose poem charting the poet’s exploration of his own consciousness (via drinking and smoking, of course)—Kissell's fantastical new work is full of unexpected juxtapositions, putting real modernist architecture, neon-lit ski-lifts or 60s pod-houses into wide-open landscapes and lush jungles.