Anne-Lise Coste

ANNE-LISE COSTE June 20 – August 9, 2013 | 195 Chrystie St, NY

Eleven Rivington is pleased to present a solo exhibition of recent work by French artist Anne-Lise Coste, on view from June 20 – through August 9, 2013 at our 195 Chrystie Street location.  The artist has shown extensively in Europe for almost 15 years and this is her first with Eleven Rivington.

The exhibition will feature new paintings executed primarily in spray-painted acrylic. In the main gallery, an immersive series of 12 black and white canvases based on details of Picasso’s Guernicabreaks down the highly complex and visually dense painting into singular appropriated and abstracted scenes. In the smaller second space of the gallery is a display of a new series of text-based works and abstract paintings. All share a unique balance of severity and airiness, in addition to sharp wit. Impulsiveness is characteristic for her work—often painting over previous attempts with gesso until satisfied.  Treating letters as units of words allow her to bypass the strict rules of language and convention. With her decisive use of a spray gun to articulate with pigment, she fuses the vitality of expressionism (direct and intuitive mark-making) with the aloofness of Pop (mechanized paint application). Coste frequently raises existential questions - the social and political content of Picasso's regarded masterpiece is undeniable - articulating them by cropping details, re-articulating or subverting specifics, or executing gestures or texts in the form of direct statements / re-statements that expose every single pore. The tangled whole of her practice is a many-voiced inner monologue, a maze whose paths seem to know only two ways out: either an implosion of meaning via repetition, or an explosion through pure overload.

Anne-Lise Coste was born 1973 in Marseille, France and currently lives and works in New York. She studied in Marseille at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, and in Zurich at the Hochschule fuer Gestaltung und Kunst. Recent and upcoming shows include Kunst-und Ausstellungshalle, Bonn, Germany; Fundacio Caixa Madrid, Spain; Esslinger Kunstverein, Esslingen, Germany; Museo de Bellas Artes de Santander, Santander, Spain.  This exhibition is presented in association with Nogueras Blanchard, Barcelona.