Essay by Steve Locke

For me, Nils Karsten’s work begins with Bunny Boy. It was the first artwork of his I saw and it has stayed with me over the 20 plus years I have known him. When he described it, he said, “Well, here’s a little Bunny Boy.” And he said it with such familiarity as if I knew what a Bunny Boy was and that I would recognize one when I saw it. In fact, I had no idea what a Bunny Boy was, but that image, like all of Nils’s work, is familiar and strange-welcoming and resistant, and endlessly unfolding. In it, I see a lot of the concerns that have engaged Nils for his entire career. Nils possesses all of the tools of the skilled draughtsman and an understanding of rendering that make the graphite turn into the pre-adolescent flesh of child. The image of the boy’s wide eyed gaze is disrupted by a direct and flat mark of a cartoon smile-what a gangster may call a “Glasgow Smile.” Add to this the bunny ears-drawn in pink a different and more gestural modality-and tied at the chin with a knot, not the bow that one would expect. These elements- the rendering, the Glasgow Smile, and the bunny ears-coalesce around the impassive gaze that stares out at us. One starts to believe-despite what appears to be a confident pose-that something is being done to this boy. The clues continue-the oversized belt, the child’s rendering of a shark, the unzipped fly of the trousers and the more we look at the image we start to ask, where did this image come from? Part of the answer in in the colorful Superman logo on the black and white sweater-this is not the result of one image. We are not seeing what we think we are seeing at first sight. It is a collection of images.

Appropriation has a long history in art that I don’t need to go into here. But what I will say is that Nils has always been captivated by the world of images and how they exist as images. This is not to say that he is not interested in meaning and that his arrangements are without content. Nothing could be further from the truth. He knows that images-particularly those in popular culture-create meaning and that they have a power independent of their original purpose. Part of this understanding comes from his love of the punk era in music and design where a DIY ethos of defacement, repurposing, repositioning, and reforming images was a way of talking back to power and claiming agency in a world that denied your existence. It may be hard for people to fathom the sense of liberation a lot of us felt in the music of the Sex Pistols, the Buzzcocks, or the Ramones. Understanding that cultural moment, one that gave us The Dead Kennedys-a band with a name that encapsulates the irreverent hopelessness of the Punk/Reagan/Thatcher era-is crucial to understanding Nils’s practice. His work embodies the sound and the smashing of things together to develop a new kind of seeing. It is born out of a need to reassemble a world that has been shattered.

Because Nils has a handmade and haptic practice, his appropriated images are not executed. They are assembled, hewn, fabricated-from the readymade to the re-made image. The massive print blocks are carved and printed by hand (with the back of a spoon). He works eschews the digital. The grid collages look printed, but they rely on meticulous cut outs from magazines from the heyday of four color offset printing. This gives the works a patina of promise; they are from a time when we believed that the world of commodities would be enough to make us happy. But in the grid all of those things equal cut into squares of the same size. Everything can be imaged because everything is available through images. Everything is here. And everything is not enough.

The scale of scope of Nils work pulls you close to inspect it. For someone whose work is contains so many immediately recognizable images it is impossible to skim or scan it. There is more to see than just what things are, Nils asks us to look at how things came to be this way. Through craft and particular attention, the work draws you in and it does not just implicate you, it includes you. There is the risk that if you get too close to the work you become another image in the collection. I know Bunny Boy now. He is trying to be grown up in a world of sharks. He wants to be powerful and be gentle at the same time. He’s trying on adult hood, knowing that it could-and will-mark him for life.

Steve Locke
Hudson, New York
2025