Galerie Nagel Draxler (formerly Galerie Christian Nagel) was founded in Cologne in 1990 and operates in Cologne, Berlin and Meseberg. We are proud to be a gallery that has a history, a present and a future. An emphasis lies on an established generation of artists who have been showing with us since the beginning and whose work has been strongly influential for following generations. Our mid-career artists take part in defining the artistic discourses of our times. Finally, with a young generation, we meet the challenges of tomorrow. We see it as a privilege to be able to give younger artists a context rooted in recent art history.

We opened in 1990 with Cosima von Bonin’s first solo show. With a strong orientation towards the new institutional critique, we welcomed artists such as Michael Krebber, Andrea Fraser, Heimo Zobernig, Mark Dion, Renée Green, Kai Althoff, John Miller, Martha Rosler, and later Joëlle Tuerlinckx and Guillaume Bijl. Gang Zhao and Kader Attia are artists of bilateral heritage who reflect on postcolonialism from a transcultural perspective. More recently, Sayre Gomez, Luke Willis Thompson and Christine Wang have joined, as well as Zandile Tshabalala.

In 2016 we opened Nagel Draxler Kabinett, which we dedicated as Crypto Kiosk from 2022 to 2024 to artists working in New Digital Art, such as Kenny Schachter, Sarah Friend, Anna Ridler, Rhea Myers and Theo Triantafyllidis. In 2019, Nagel Draxler Munich was added. In the summer of 2021, we organised the 1st Meseberg International in Brandenburg, where we inaugurated our guest house with sculpture garden in spring 2025.

Sarah Friend is a Canadian artist and researcher based in Berlin whose work uses sculpture, games, and interactive software to respond to pop culture and emerging technology. She has exhibited at MoMA (NYC), Centre Pompidou (Metz), Kunsthaus Zürich, Haus der Kunst (Munich), ArtScience Museum (Singapore), Rhizome (NYC), and KW Institute for Contemporary Art (Berlin), among others.

Her project Prompt Baby — recently exhibited at SculptureCenter in New York and listed by Artnews as one of the best projects of 2025 — invites collectors to prompt a fine-tuned AI model trained on images of the artist herself. Every request is personally reviewed, approved, denied, or negotiated by Friend, raising questions of consent, synthetic identity, and the body-as-interface.

The original set of prompt credits sold out in 16 seconds. But not all collectors followed the rules. The nine whose images are included in this new edition “defected”, meaning they submitted a prompt but then resold the corresponding token on the secondary market before the artist had finished making and uploading the results–thereby breaking the contract. These “outtakes”, disinherited from the original set, are released here for the first time ever.

Also hidden within the edition are 9 special foil cards, each with a gold leaf kiss. One special edition for each of the 9 possible images.