Mathias Kessler is an artist and commercial photographer working between New York and Europe, with clients on both continents. He makes images for brands, agencies, and magazines — campaigns, portraits, beauty, and editorial — and brings to every commission the eye of a practicing fine artist whose work also shows in galleries and museums.
Photography runs in the family: his grandfather opened a studio in Austria in 1907. Kessler grew up in an alpine resort town — “growing up on someone else’s holiday,” as he puts it — and has been fascinated ever since by how images are built, how light, staging, and retouching turn a subject into something more than a record of it. That instinct, to construct an image rather than simply capture one, gives his commercial work its surprising, slightly off-center take on the world we live in.
His photographs have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Surface, Source, GQ Germany, Die Zeit, Camera Austria, and Kunstforum International. Clients include Nike, Globus, Julius Bär, Ed. Meier, Huber, Prosper Marketplace, the architecture firms Herzog & de Meuron and Neil Denari / NMDA, and Richard Pandiscio, alongside advertising agencies across Europe and the US. His art practice has been exhibited internationally at Kunsthal Rotterdam, Kunsthaus Graz, and the Columbus Museum of Art, and he holds an MFA from the School of Visual Arts.
It’s that double fluency — equally at home with an agency and a gallery — that defines his work.
For projects and bookings: [info@photo-kessler.com] · [+43 676 461 9054]