about

Nykoli Koslow is a Milwaukee-based painter whose practice often extends into drawing, animation, and VR. Fusing figuration with abstraction, Nykoli anchors the innate trans* experience within a queer mythic cosmology, creating a world that is both primal and post-apocalyptic amid the current fall of auto-cannibalistic regimes. In resistance, the body mutates and alchemizes to extreme and strange degrees. What has been socially pathologized and oppressed, poisoned and stripped of agency, returns to nature. Consequently, the dismantled body becomes both a metaphor for otherness and a practice of authentic expression in defiance of dominant hegemonic structures.

Nykoli earned his BFA from the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee, Peck School of the Arts, in 2013. His work has been featured in the Museum of Wisconsin Art’s 10 at 10 exhibition (2023) and the Wisconsin Artists Biennial (2024). From 2021 to 2022, he served as Artist in Residence at the Pfister Hotel, culminating in the solo exhibition Queer Mythologies: TransAbstractions at Saint Kate Arts Hotel. His public art contributions include murals for Swanson Elementary (2017) and the NoMADmke Wauwatosa Mural Corridor (2019). In 2023, he was selected for the gener8tor Art x Sherman Phoenix Accelerator fall cohort and exhibited Queer Cosmology: The Making of a Universe at Var Gallery, which currently represents his work. Nykoli is currently pursuing his MFA at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.

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