Kölnischer Kunstverein

In the space of almost ten years Adriano Costa has created a body of work that establishes a bridge between South American and European art, updates artistic movements like Neoconcretismo or Arte Povera and provides them with a new dimension. Born in 1975 this Brazilian artist makes assemblages, sculptures, paintings and films on the basis of found materials and everyday objects; in his exhibitions he combines them together into expansive installations in such a way that they result in stage-like scenes 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 the moment. Like a curious and open-minded tourist he thus explores his various “research areas” and, in doing so, he follows not just the well-known main paths, 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 employing the precise practices of scholars. For Costa the 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 the given explorations and investigations. The boundaries between art and “non-art” are occasionally undermined within this context, testifying to his efforts to more closely intertwine art and life.