Adriano Costa —  DearMeatCutsDevilMayCry
July 23 — August 27, 2016
David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles

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.

Piotr ?akomy
October 2015 — January 2016
SpazioA, Pistoia

SpazioA presented on Saturday October 31, 2015, at 6pm, the first exhibition in Italy by the Polish artist Piotr ?akomy. Piotr ?akomy creates installations remaining in dialogue with architecture, that reacts to the present space, relating it to the scale of the human body. Using these proportions he creates a kind of “painterly landscape” in which human left traces of his presence. By bringing the anthropometric factor ?akomy allows the spectator to “set against” the object, both literally and metaphorically. A key role in his works is played by the used materials, their origin and physical properties. Equally important is the social context in which these materials are functioning in everyday life – the nature of the relationship they establish between humans and their surroundings, environment, earth and the sky. Arranging space ?akomy often operates with light and its sources. He uses and interprets it in different ways: as an energy carrier, information about space and architecture, as well as a testimony of time, expressed in the transience of the technology available to us.