Adriano Costa: wetANDsomeOLDstuffVANDALIZEDbyTHEartist

Curated by Moritz Wesseler

Over the course of almost ten years, Adriano Costa has created a body of work that establishes bridges between South American and European art, and reinvents artistic movements such as “Neoconretismo” and “Arte Povera,” adding a new—often highly personal—dimension to these art-historical precursors. Born in 1975, this Brazilian artist makes assemblages, sculptures, paintings and films, often deploying found materials and everyday objects; in his exhibitions, he combines these elements into expansive installations to produce stage-like scenarios comparable with “environments.” At the same time, his works are usually the result of extensive and time-consuming research, which Costa carries out wherever he is staying at a given moment. Like a curious and open-minded tourist, he thus explores various “research areas” and, in doing so, he follows not only the well-known paths of conceptualism and assemblage art, but also and particularly those routes within urban as well as rural contexts which receive less attention or are overlooked. He is interested in ethnological, sociological and historical developments and phenomena, and he makes these the subject matter of his works, but without adhering to the precise and deliberate methodologies of academics. For Costa, different themes and lines of enquiry serve, to a certain extent, as a vehicle for his poetic and not infrequently humorous articulations, which he forms out of the found pieces, mementoes and objects from given explorations and investigations. The boundaries between art and “non-art” are occasionally undermined within this context, testifying to his efforts to intertwine art and life more closely.

Costa spent an extended period of time in the Rhineland to carry out the preparations for his exhibition at the Kölnischer Kunstverein, and this enabled him to investigate and explore the region’s social and historical conditions as well as its interconnections in terms of urban planning and landscape. Thus, in the context of this presentation, the focus is less on older works than on recent pieces, which are interwoven into a site-specific installation in the institution’s various spaces: the central exhibition hall, the cabinet-style gallery in the lower level and the cinema. At the same time, this remarkably multifaceted project is linked with efforts to highlight parallels as well as contrasts between European and South American societies in order to heighten our awareness of living in a globalised world.

With the kind support of Stadt Köln, Stiftung Kunst, Kultur und Soziales der Sparda-Bank West, Kunststiftung NRW.

The exhibition project is underpinned and supported by great commitment from Andra Laufs-Wegner & KAT_A