KATE COSTELLO

(B. 1974)

Interior/Exterior, 2025

Footnotes

Provenance
Courtesy of the artist

The diptych is from Arcade, a series of paintings and sculptures that explore the crossing paths of graphic languages and narrative traditions. The imagery of the paintings are drawn from comic frames, often of a scene that creates space between moments of action in the storyline. The paintings are representational yet include the traces of underpainting, sketches and brushwork, the application of the paint is transparent, allowing the layers to remain visible. There are stylistic aspects that connect to the friezes of Pompeii, to the comics they derive from, and to symbolist painters who work with ideas of collage. While the paintings quote elements from the comics, they replicate the scenes with a focus on the peripheral details and work to disrupt the easy confidence these texts exude.

—Kate Costello

The constellation of Kate Costello's work connects details of visual vernaculars with larger archetypes of language and influence. The Tip of the Tongue, a 15-year survey solo exhibition opened at the galleries at School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston in January 2020. A text by Gloria Sutton responding to this exhibit and the larger themes explored in Costello's work was published in X-TRA Magazine summer 2021. In 2019 and 2018, she received commissions for public artworks from Tufts University, Medford, MA, and from Innovation Foundation and the City of West Hollywood, CA. In 2016, Costello published an artist's book, P&P, with Midgramme Press, NY and was an Artist in Residence at Headlands Center for the Arts, Marin, CA. In 2015, she co-curated an exhibition of figurative sculpture, Mirror Effect, with Liz Craft at the The Box Gallery, Los Angeles. Costello's first book, Fears & Accessories, was published by onestar press, Paris in 2014. Recent solo exhibitions include: Hermits' Strand, Henricks Art Wall, Tufts University, MA, 2019, Drawings, LAXART, Los Angeles, 2015; Kiki & Me, Rob Tufnell Gallery, London in 2014; Kiki & Me, Wallspace Gallery, NY and Kate Costello, The Suburban Gallery, IL both in 2011; Cockaigne, RFA, Los Angeles, 2010; Tattooed Ladies, Wallspace Gallery, NY 2008. Selected group exhibitions include: Made in LA, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, 2012; This Place You See... Kadist Foundation, Paris, 2009; THING: New Sculpture from Los Angeles, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, 2005; High Desert Test Sites, Joshua Tree, CA, in 2003 and 2017. Costello's work is in the permanent collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, The Hammer Museum of Art, The Nevada Museum of Art Land Art Collection and Tufts University Collection.