Michael Kagan was born in Virginia Beach in 1980 and is now based in Brooklyn, where his oil paintings — built from large, deliberate brushstrokes that read as abstraction up close and resolve into legible figures only as the viewer steps back — have made him one of the most distinctive chroniclers of human endeavour working in contemporary American art. His subjects run from mountaineers and Formula 1 drivers to fighter pilots and astronauts, the men and machines of exploration rendered in a thick, gestural language that owes as much to Abstract Expressionism as to figurative painting. His work is held in collections including the Smithsonian Institution, the Hall Art Collection, and Fidelity Investments' corporate collection.
Kagan's astronaut series — the body of work for which he is best known — returns obsessively to the specific visual experience of space: helmet visors, suit details, the reflected world within a curved surface, the lone figure dwarfed by the void around it. These are paintings about the heroism of the very small gesture — one person, one suit, one decision — made under conditions of complete isolation. The scale and the brushwork conspire to make the figure feel both monumentally significant and impossibly vulnerable.
His print output is produced through long-standing partnerships with specialist studios, most notably Brand X Editions in New York, and translates the layered, gestural quality of his painting into richly built-up colour separations rather than clean, graphic reproductions. Each edition is signed by the artist, and edition sizes are kept deliberately small, meaning his prints offer one of the more accessible entry points to a painter whose originals are held in institutional collections on two continents.
The work available through Creed Gallery is Moonwalker (2024), a screenprint in colours on Magnani Incisioni paper produced with Brand X Editions, from a signed edition of 150. Available through Creed Gallery, Ascot, for collectors across Berkshire, Surrey, and London.
