Lara Kittel (she/her) is a South Australian emerging artist currently undertaking a Master of Fine Art (Painting) at the National Art School in Sydney. Her current project uses oil paint to critically examine the construction of the touristic gaze within Australian beach culture.

Her Honours exegesis, Overexposed: Painting the Australian Tourist Gaze, translated digital snapshots into deliberate acts of painting that question how tourism mediates perception and interaction with the Australian landscape. In photography, overexposure results in the loss of detail through excessive light; here, it operates as a conceptual framework for understanding how Australian vistas are simplified through time and repetition of the circulated image.

Kittel uses a reductive painting style and employs thick, loaded brushwork on paper. She reveals how the image is no longer tied to a fixed moment, but is instead a constructed concept.

A 2022 Adelaide Central School of Art graduate and 2025 Honours graduate, Kittel was a finalist in the 2023 Heart of the Bush exhibition in Goondiwindi, Queensland. She undertook an artist residency in 2024 at A Position on Retreat in Vancouver Island, where she expanded her practice through en plein air painting in the old-growth forests of Avatar Grove. Kittel has exhibited in several group shows, including, The Disconnect at Floating Goose Studios and the 2025 SALA exhibition This is Australia. She was a finalist in the 2023 and 2024 Gallery M Contemporary Art Prize and won the 2023 Ian Wilding Emerging Artist Prize.