Monday January 8th, 2024
7:00PM - 8:30PM
Mark Kostabi is unquestionably one of the most recognizable icons to emerge from New York’s legendary 1980s East Village art scene. A contemporary of Andy Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat, Kostabi invented a wholly unique art style that has resonated with audiences around the globe.
His universal, faceless figures inhabit surreal worlds of colors and contrasts. Worlds where his subjects interact with themes of love, isolation, technology, and modern anxieties.
Driven by his lifelong passion for art, Kostabi studied his craft at California State University. At the age of 19, he began selling his designs to galleries in Los Angeles and quickly attracted celebrity collectors. In 1982, he moved to New York, arguably the center of the art world at the time. Kostabi thrived in the city’s fertile art community, but his career skyrocketed after he was inspired by one of his artistic heroes, Andy Warhol. Warhol was famous for founding “The Factory,” the notorious art studio where Warhol would work with artists and artisans to mass-produce his famous designs.
Kostabi, in turn, took that model to the next level. In the tradition of Warhol’s Factory or Picasso’s work with the ceramic artisans in Vallauris, Kostabi created “Kostabi World,” a studio in New York where he would work with teams of artists to create artwork in his trademark “Kostabi-style.”
“Kostabi World” became such an art world sensation. During a publicity frenzy, Kostabi took great pleasure in antagonizing the media. He would provoke reporters with claims that others created his art or draw them into debates about art authorship. Meanwhile, the artist enjoyed endless free publicity for his mischievous jabs at the press.
However, despite his playful comments, Kostabi always remained the true “author” of his artwork, a fact that is bolstered by the impressive awards and honors he has received throughout his career.
One particular highlight occurred during the height of the Cold War when Kostabi collaborated with a team of artists to create original Kostabi paintings in Russia. This led to Kostabi being featured at his own sold-out show at the Hermitage, making him the only contemporary Western artist ever to have a modern art show in Russia before the fall of the Soviet Union.
Today, Kostabi splits his time between New York and Rome, now painting more than ever before, and continues the work of “Kostabi World” as he brings his exceptional, enigmatic art to collectors worldwide.
Later, in the 1980s, Kostabi turned to a business model for producing his art, much as Andy Warhol had done before him. Adopting practices common to advertising, Kostabi developed his own “brand” for making art, conducting market research on what to paint and hiring creative thinkers to generate ideas and skilled technicians to paint them.
Kostabi’s paintings are easily identifiable by their characteristic faceless robotic figures who engage in a variety of activities that suggest poetic or metaphoric meanings. Overall, these paintings are largely philosophical, with many positing probable truths or posing unanswerable questions about the nature of being. His recurring subjects include romantic love, identity, artistic expression, the impact of pop culture and social media on modern life, and the erasure of human individuality.
“I’m consciously reflecting the time we live in,” Kostabi has said. “In the 80s, I was painting faceless figures with Walkman radios and boom boxes and backpack computers because that was the new thing back then. But that’s all gone and now the Kostabi figures have iPhones.”
Kostabi’s artwork currently appears in over 50 permanent museum collections, including the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Guggenheim Museum, the Brooklyn Museum, the National Gallery in Washington D.C., the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Los Angeles’ Museum of Contemporary Art, the National Gallery of Modern Art in Rome, and the Groninger Museum in Holland.
Retrospective exhibitions of Kostabi’s paintings have been held at the Mitsukoshi Museum in Tokyo (1992) and the Art Museum of Estonia in Tallinn (1998). The famous Italian art historian and curator, Vittorio Sgarbi, curated a vast exhibition of 150 Kostabi paintings at the Chiostro del Bramante in Rome in 2006.
Kostabi’s permanent public works include a mural in Palazzo dei Priori in Arezzo, Italy, a large bronze sculpture in the central square of San Benedetto del Tronto, Italy, and a bronze portrait of Pope John Paul II in Velletri, Italy.
https://www.parkwestgallery.com/artist/mark-kostabi/
Walter Robinson (aka Mike Robinson, born in Wilmington, Delaware) is a New York City-based painter, publisher, art curator and art writer. He has been called a Neo-pop painter, as well as a member of the 1980s The Pictures Generation. He moved to New York City to attend Columbia University in 1968. Subsequently, he graduated from the Whitney Independent Study Program in 1973.
Robinson is a postmodern painter whose work features painterly images taken from covers of romance novel paperbacks as well as still lifes of cheeseburgers, French fries and beer, and pharmaceutical products like aspirin and vaseline. He also made and exhibited large-scale spin paintings in the mid-1980s, in advance of his colleague Damien Hirst.
A 2014 touring exhibition of Robinson's paintings included more than 90 works dating from 1979 to 2014. It premiered at the University Galleries at Illinois State University in Normal, Illinois, and subsequently appeared in Philadelphia at the Moore College of Art.The show's final stop was at the Jeffrey Deitch Gallery in New York City in September 2016
Robinson's works have been exhibited at several New York galleries since the 1980s, including Semaphore Gallery and Metro Pictures Gallery. An exhibition of his paintings, paired with a poem by Charles Bukowski, There's a Bluebird in My Heart, was on view in Spring 2016 at Owen James Gallery in Greenpoint, Brooklyn.
Robinson began writing about art in the 1970s, when he co-founded with Edit DeAk the art zine Art-Rite in New York's SoHo art district.
He subsequently served as news editor of Art in America magazine (1980–96) and founding editor of Artnet Magazine (1996-2012). In 2013-14 he was a columnist for Artspace.com, where his essay on Zombie Formalism appeared. He also served as art editor of the East Village Eye in the early ‘80s.
Robinson was also active in Collaborative Projects (aka Colab) in the early 1980s, acting as president for a short time and participating in The Times Square Show.
In the ‘90s he was a correspondent for GalleryBeat TV, a public-access television show.