Anne-Lise Coste

Anne-Lise Coste - House #3

Technique: Oil pastel on paper

Artist Biography: Anne-Lise Coste is a Swiss artist born in Marseille, France in 1973. Her work spans a variety of media, including painting, drawing, writing and performance. Coste has become known for her highly personal and expressive style, which combines abstraction with figurative and textual elements.Much of Coste's work focuses on the exploration of identity, language and politics. He often uses writing as an integral part of his artistic practice, incorporating poetic and political texts into his works. She has also explored themes of memory, feminism and cultural criticism in her work.Coste has exhibited in numerous galleries and museums around the world, including the Kunsthaus Baselland in Switzerland, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago and the Museum of Modern Art in Paris. His work is in public and private collections worldwide, including the collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

 

In the winter of 2010, Anne-Lise Coste (Marseille, 1973) locked herself away for five days to evoke the five years of adolescence during which she had undergone clinical treatment. It was a personal exorcism that took the form of a series of drawings that obsessively develop the same theme: the hospital architecture and the cloistered atmosphere that preserved the artist's personal memory. As in other works by this New York-based French artist, the immediate gesture of the drawing combines a strong poetic charge with an element of social criticism. In this case, regarding the management of illness and closed clinical spaces. Although the drawings nakedly show a painful life experience, the personal reading does not exhaust the work. The series does not pretend to be a documentary reconstruction of a biographical episode, nor does it evoke specific fantasies. The emphasis is placed, explicitly and radically, on the reproduction of an experience in space: the room is not shown as its own space of recollection, but as an inhospitable place, populated by internal rumors. Drawing plays a fundamental role in Anne-Lise Coste's work, as does the everyday universe, which becomes the artist's raw material. But the hospital drawings renounce the use of words. This time she does not need fragmented phrases or repeated words to be forceful. In this sense, it is in line with much of her work, in which she often evokes the past and childhood to dismantle parental authority and show the limits of education. Through a personal experience, the artist raises universal themes.