Adriano Costa

DearMeatCutsDevilMayCry

July 23 – August 27, 2016

Installation Views

Installation Views Thumbnails

Individual Works

Individual Works Thumbnails

Adriano Costa
BackyardPainting, 2016
acrylic and flowers on blanket
73 1/2 x 46 1/4 x 1/8 inches
(186.7 x 117.5 x .3 cm)

Adriano Costa
PostInternetIsJustInternet/LouisUGotMePhone, 2016
acrylic and UV print on canvas
117 x 64 inches
(297.2 x 162.6 cm)

Adriano Costa
RottenCheeseLettuceAndASliceOfTomato, 2016
t-shirt, fabric and acrylic on plywood panel
74 x 47 x 2 1/8 inches
(188 x 119.4 x 5.4 cm)

Adriano Costa
We'reGonnaChangeTheWorld, 2016
tools, acrylic and UV print on blanket mounted on wood
80 1/2 x 72 1/2 x 8 inches
(204.5 x 184.2 x 20.3 cm)

Adriano Costa
Wishes, 2016
UV print on fabric
59 1/2 x 98 inches
(151.1 x 248.9 cm)

Adriano Costa
OnceThereWasMusicOn, 2016
metal flake lacquer on found objects
48 x 108 x 29 1/2 inches
(121.9 x 274.3 x 74.9 cm)

Adriano Costa
TheButcher'sArms, 2016
spray paint and leather mounted on wood
78 x 58 x 2 1/2 inches
(198.1 x 147.3 x 6.4 cm)

Adriano Costa
Flag, 2016
UV print on paper bag, fabric and stones
13 3/4 x 7 x 4 inches
(34.9 x 17.8 x 10.2 cm)

Adriano Costa
Hammurabi3, 2016
UV print on cardboard
36 x 72 3/4 x 1/8 inches
(91.4 x 184.8 x .3 cm)

Adriano Costa
PostInternet, 2016
mixed media on paper
16 x 11 inches
(40.6 x 27.9 cm)

Adriano Costa
Yoga3, 2016
mixed media on toilet paper tube
4 x 5 1/4 inches
(10.2 x 13.3 cm)

Adriano Costa
Pear, 2016
acrylic and pen on cardboard and toilet paper tube
6 3/4 x 10 inches
(17.1 x 25.4 cm)

Adriano Costa
Yoga, 2016
mixed media on toilet paper tube
4 x 5 1/4 inches
(10.2 x 13.3 cm)

Adriano Costa
TwoBoysSawOnTheInternet, 2016
mixed media on paper
8 1/4 x 10 3/8 inches
(21 x 26.4 cm)

Adriano Costa
Sodoma, 2016
mixed media on found cardboard
25 x 14 1/4 inches
(63.5 x 36.2 cm)

Adriano Costa
Arnold,TheMayor, 2016
mixed media on paper
12 x 9 inches
(30.5 x 22.9 cm)

Adriano Costa
HotYoga, 2016
mixed media on toilet paper tube
3 3/8 x 9 1/2 inches
(8.6 x 24.1 cm)

Adriano Costa
AGuyPayingTheBills, 2016
mixed media on found cardboard
9 3/4 x 6 1/8 inches
(24.8 x 15.6 cm)

Adriano Costa
JackInTheBox, 2016
mixed media on paper
11 3/4 x 8 1/2 inches
(29.8 x 21.6 cm)

Adriano Costa
Landscape, 2016
mixed media on fabric
9 1/2 x 9 1/2 inches
(24.1 x 24.1 cm)

Adriano Costa
Hammurabi2, 2016
acrylic and UV print on canvas
58 x 64 inches
(147.3 x 162.6 cm)

Adriano Costa
LedZeppelin, 2016
mixed media on paper receipt
3 1/4 x 7 5/8 inches
(8.3 x 19.4 cm)

Adriano Costa
AbstractBurgers, 2016
mixed media on paper
4 1/8 x 11 inches
(10.5 x 27.9 cm)

Adriano Costa
HappyBuddha, 2016
mixed media on toilet paper tube, mounted on museum board
11 x 3 1/2 x 1/8 inches
(27.9 x 8.9 x .3 cm)

Adriano Costa
Arnold,TheMayor2, 2016
mixed media on toilet paper tube
5 3/8 x 3 7/8 inches
(13.7 x 9.8 cm)

Adriano Costa
Business, 2016
mixed media on toilet paper tube
3 3/4 x 10 inches
(9.5 x 25.4 cm)

Adriano Costa
PartyLads, 2016
mixed media on paper
4 x 11 inches
(10.2 x 27.9 cm)

Adriano Costa
Yoga2, 2016
mixed media on toilet paper tube
4 x 5 1/4 inches
(10.2 x 13.3 cm)

Adriano Costa
CopsYoga, 2016
mixed media on toilet paper tube
5 3/8 x 3 7/8 inches
(13.7 x 9.8 cm)

Adriano Costa
WhenInRome, 2016
UV print on foamcore
54 x 72 5/8 x 1 1/2 inches
(137.2 x 184.5 x 3.8 cm)

Adriano Costa
GratefulDeadFungus, 2016
mixed media on paper
8 1/4 x 11 3/4 inches
(21 x 29.8 cm)

Adriano Costa
Peace, 2016
mixed media on paper
11 1/2 x 8 1/4 inches
(29.2 x 21 cm)

Adriano Costa
Party, 2016
mixed media on paper
11 1/2 x 8 1/4 inches
(29.2 x 21 cm)

Adriano Costa
Desperation, 2016
mixed media on postcard
4 1/8 x 5 7/8 inches
(10.5 x 14.9 cm)

Adriano Costa
Harvard, 2016
mixed media on found cardboard
9 1/4 x 9 5/8 inches
(23.5 x 24.4 cm)

Adriano Costa
Beef, 2016
mixed media on paper
5 1/4 x 8 1/4 inches
(13.3 x 21 cm)

Adriano Costa
Mask, 2016
mixed media on found cardboard
8 1/4 x 6 1/4 inches
(21 x 15.9 cm)

Adriano Costa
CopyrightPoems/TheOlympics, 2016
mixed media on paper
11 3/4 x 8 3/8 inches
(29.8 x 21.3 cm)

Adriano Costa
Policies, 2016
chalk and acrylic on plywood
48 x 48 x 1/2 inches
(121.9 x 121.9 x 1.3 cm)

Adriano Costa
WhenAManLovesAWoman, 2016
oil, pastel and pen on paper
13 7/8 x 17 3/4 inches
(35.2 x 45.1 cm)

Adriano Costa
Rent!, 2016
acrylic, pastel, pencil, pen, paper and UV print on canvas
66 x 74 1/2 x 2 inches
(167.6 x 189.2 x 5.1 cm)

Adriano Costa
Malibu, 2016
mixed media on toilet paper tube
3 7/8 x 5 1/2 inches
(9.8 x 14 cm)

Adriano Costa
PotatoIce, 2016
mixed media on fabric
18 1/2 x 11 3/4 inches
(47 x 29.8 cm)

Adriano Costa
Blessing, 2016
heat transfer on socks and trousers, blanket mounted on wood
92 1/2 x 76 x 4 inches
(235 x 193 x 10.2 cm)

Adriano Costa
Beans, 2016
mixed media on paper
9 3/4 x 7 1/2 inches
(24.8 x 19.1 cm)

Adriano Costa
Turkeys, 2016
acrylic, pencil and pen on paper
overall:
11 1/2 x 44 1/4 inches
(29.2 x 112.4 cm)

Adriano Costa
SpiritualityInContemporaryArt3, 2016
UV print on wood
8 1/4 x 10 1/2 x 1/2 inches
(21 x 26.7 x 1.3 cm)

Adriano Costa
Misery, 2016
oil and pen on paper
14 x 17 3/4 inches
(35.6 x 45.1 cm)

Adriano Costa
It'sRainingPenises, 2016
mixed media on found cardboard
6 1/4 x 9 7/8 inches
(15.9 x 25.1 cm)

Adriano Costa
Venus, 2016
mixed media on paper
11 1/2 x 8 1/4 inches
(29.2 x 21 cm)

Adriano Costa
SpiritualityInContemporaryArt2, 2016
UV print on found object
40 1/8 x 60 x 1/8 inches
(101.9 x 152.4 x .3 cm)

Adriano Costa
Hammurabi4, 2016
chalk and blackboard paint on skateboards
overall:
31 1/4 x 15 3/8 x 1/2 inches
(79.4 x 39.1 x 1.3 cm)

Adriano Costa
HydroponicCosmogonia, 2016
mixed media mounted on wood
59 x 38 x 2 1/4 inches
(149.9 x 96.5 x 5.7 cm)

Adriano Costa
BigBangPsychedelicCheese, 2016
powder-coated steel
1 1/2 x 129 x 130 inches
(3.8 x 327.7 x 330.2 cm)

Adriano Costa
Statements, 2016
UV print on canvas
84 1/2 x 40 1/2 inches
(214.6 x 102.9 cm)

Adriano Costa
Statement, 2016
mixed media
122 x 149 x 7 1/2 inches
(309.9 x 378.5 x 19.1 cm)

Adriano Costa
WeDeserveAJob, 2016
UV print, spray paint, acrylic and pastel on canvas
63 x 109 inches
(160 x 276.9 cm)

Adriano Costa
Prèt-A-Porter, 2016
steel, copper and shrink wrap
3/8 x 90 x 90 inches
(1 x 228.6 x 228.6 cm)

Adriano Costa
Prèt-A-Porter, 2016
steel, copper and shrink wrap
3/8 x 90 x 90 inches
(1 x 228.6 x 228.6 cm)

Adriano Costa
SpiritualityInContemporaryArt, 2016
UV print on bath mat, canvas and styrofoam
overall:
24 1/2 x 56 1/4 x 1 1/2 inches
(62.2 x 142.9 x 3.8 cm)

Adriano Costa
MisticismoHistórico, 2016
silver and jewelry display pedestal
3 1/2 x 3 1/2 x 3 1/2 inches
(8.9 x 8.9 x 8.9 cm)

Adriano Costa
OldFashioned/Trava, 2016
silver
3 x 2 x 2 inches
(7.6 x 5.1 x 5.1 cm)

Adriano Costa
TheKingOfAllTacos, 2016
UV print, acrylic and pen on canvas
52 x 64 inches
(132.1 x 162.6 cm)

Adriano Costa
Celine, 2016
bronze, American flag, clothes, bamboo, sugarcane and various found objects
67 x 103 x 19 inches
(170.2 x 261.6 x 48.3 cm)

Press Release

David Kordansky Gallery is pleased to announce DearMeatCutsDevilMayCry, an exhibition of new work by Adriano Costa. The artist’s first solo show in the United States, it will open on July 23 and remain on view through August 27, 2016. An opening reception will be held on Saturday, July 23 from 6:00pm until 8:00pm.

Adriano Costa culls his materials from the detritus of contemporary existence. He weaves together poetic tableaux from objects and images generally regarded as ephemeral, accidental, or discarded. In his work these forms find new life while retaining markers of their disvalued state, allowing the artist to hold up a mirror to the social divisions, the pervasive dread, and the paradoxical, fallen beauty that characterize life in the first quarter of the 21st century. Costa’s practice often involves working on site in whatever city his next exhibition will take place, and he combines materials foraged from the urban landscape of his native São Paolo with those he finds in his temporary adopted homes. DearMeatCutsDevilMayCry will therefore reflect the booming and broken dream-state that is Los Angeles, the political and economic disasters facing Brazil at a moment when it is very much on the world stage, and the perennially decaying cornucopia of information that is the Internet, where a large part of the global population currently maintains a second residence.

The exhibition features works made using a wide range of processes, and includes paintings, works on paper, and a diversity of sculptures, though it is impossible to relegate any given piece to a single one of these categories. Costa’s approach to installation reinforces this notion. Works that might ordinarily be placed on the floor are suspended from the wall and vice versa, and almost all are replete with imagery and text that speak to the moment of their creation.

A hanging bath mat, canvas fragment, and the top of a styrofoam to-go box, for instance, bear printed dates in the style of On Kawara: “22 JUL 2016″, “23 JUL. 2016” and “24 JUL 2016″, the day before, of, and just after the exhibition’s opening. In this case, as in several others, cutting-edge digital printing techniques are applied to the most humble and abject of materials. Similarly, in many sculptures Costa combines durable media like steel and aluminum with ad hoc objects and unstable substances that are the very definition of impermanence. He thereby undermines traditional notions of value, and highlights unsustainable attitudes toward luxury in a world brimming with deprivation.

Despite the pressing contemporaneity that characterizes his work, Costa is also an astute descendant of the rich art historical traditions particular to Brazilian modernism. These include Neo-Concretism and Antropofagia, a movement that originated in the 1920s and celebrated the cannibalization of Eurocentric cultural forms, reimagining and distorting them from a South American position at the geographical periphery. Such reference points help situate Costa’s affinity for consuming the stuff of world culture and regurgitating it according to the unavoidable particularities of his own sensibility, as well as the compositional decentralization that informs each of his works and his exhibitions as a whole. If the products of this regurgitation are notable for their aesthetic subtleties, and a finely tuned sensitivity to geometry, color, and volume, Costa’s is an aesthetic in crisis, one in which formal decisions feel inevitable rather than planned, and works are not finished so much as posed as ongoing questions. As such, his aesthetic is inseparable from the pertinent extra-aesthetic issues of the age, including income inequality, the constant threat of reactionary politics, and the authoritarian abuse of power, as well as the fact of the artist’s own queerness, all of which he allows to saturate his work even as he eschews polemics.

Costa instead delights in uneasy contradiction and slack humor, both of which are on view in a work on canvas featuring appropriated images of a muscle-bound Arnold Schwarzenegger in his beefcake prime. Equal parts digital collage, political commentary, studio painting, and agitprop-style provocation, the work is like a Google image search gone wrong, with decidedly non-digital interventions (doodles, scrawled marks, erasures) registering the emotional timbre of the artist’s response to the political and ideological climate of California, where originality is indistinguishable from artifice. Slapdash painted text reads “Muscular / Committed / Refugee / Versatile / Indigenous”, speaking to the troublesome social hierarchies in a state where the line separating Muscle Beach from the governor’s mansion is as porous as Swiss cheese.

The image of Swiss cheese, incidentally, plays an important and recurrent role in Costa’s practice. It appears in this exhibition in the form of a sculpture consisting of a grid of aluminum tiles, punctuated by irregularly shaped openings that give way to the floor below. Easily trod underfoot, its holes both pornographic and purely spatial, the sculpture’s radically low profile renders it at once inconspicuous and pervasive, dependent on the space in which it is installed, and yet stubbornly insistent on claiming its own territory within that space.

In this way Costa incorporates his surroundings at every turn, whether that means responding to the news dominating the media, reacting to the environments in which his work is shown, or making use of objects he acquires as he moves through a given city. A new work of the latter sort plays a key part in DearMeatCutsDevilMayCry. By applying an industrial, glittering gold finish to a group of found objects, including a bass drum, a walker, and a vacuum cleaner all acquired at a thrift store within close proximity to the gallery, Costa has created an unlikely family of stand-ins for the contemporary human subject. Bathed in visual symbolism indicative of the promise of easy wealth, and yet divorced from the purposes of their own labor, the objects hang together by the slightest of conceptual threads, united by surface alone as their usefulness disintegrates. With this exhibition opening less than two weeks before the already fraught spectacle of the 2016 Summer Olympics in Rio de Janeiro, works like these channel the corruption and despair, the crumbling nostalgia, and the specters of disease, that are, despite their ominous undertones and overtones, inexhaustible sources of life as we know it now.

Adriano Costa (b. 1975, São Paolo) was recently the subject of the solo exhibitions Draw Flying Penis/Pussy Against Gentrification, White Cubicle Toilet Gallery, London (2015); Tia Deth (with Stefania Batoeva), Emalin, London (2015); and La Commedia dell’Arte, Peep-Hole, Milan (2014). Recent group exhibitions include What separates us, Embassy of Brazil in London (2016); Volcano Extravaganza 2015, Fiorucci Art Trust, Stromboli, Italy (2015); Real Painting, Castlefield Gallery, Manchester, United Kingdom (2015); Under the Same Sun: Art From Latin America Today, Guggenheim Museum, New York (2014, traveling); Postcodes, Casa de Povo, São Paulo (2014); IMAGINE BRAZIL, Astrup Fearnley Museet, Oslo, and Musée D’Art Contemporain de Lyon, France (2013, traveling); Time Space Poker Face, Be-Part, Waregem, Belgium (2013); and Correspondências, Instituto Tomie Ohtake, São Paolo (2013). Costa lives and works in São Paolo.