Kirstine Reiner Hansen was born and raised in Denmark, but has lived in the US of a large part of her life, as well as living in the UK, Switzerland , and Berlin, Germany. She received a BA in Design and Illustration at Design School Kolding, Denmark, but quickly decided on her path as an artist.

Her work has been exhibited in numerous galleries in the US and in Europe. In 2012 she received the Lillian Orlowsky and William Freed Foundation Grant and was twice a semi-finalist for the Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition at the Smithsonian. She has been featured in Juxtapoz magazine, Kaltblut magazine, as well as in the book, Disrupted Realism-Paintings for a Distracted World, by John Seed, 2019. Her work is featured in the German film “Meaning of a Ritual” by Berlin director Natalie MacMahon, 2023.

Kirstine works primarily in oils. Her subjects are figures and landscape using both old master and modernist abstract techniques resulting in a visually disrupted style. Inspiration is found in fashion photography, old Hollywood movies, and historical paintings from the renaissance to the modernists. In her process she finds that the painterly puzzle of the disparate elements, layered and combined, employing a multitude of paint effects, presents the necessary artistic challenge to create unexpected visual narratives.