Mark Kostabi

MARK KOSTABI (United States, 1960).
"Donna with book," 2023.
Lithograph on cardboard, copy XXII/XXX.
Signed, dated and justified by hand.
Measurements: 70 x 54 cm; 79 x 62 cm (frame).

Mark Kostabi's style is characterized by faceless, anonymous human figures, theatrical compositions and a strong symbolic and surrealistic air. His paintings often show stylized bodies in ambiguous, sometimes disturbing scenes related to power, ambition, human relationships and contemporary culture, using intense colors, highly polished surfaces and an aesthetic close to both pop art and Italian metaphysical art, influenced by De Chirico and the commercial art of the 1980s.

The son of Estonian immigrants, Mark Kostabi was born in Los Angeles, and studied drawing and painting at the University of California. In 1982 he moved to New York, and two years later he was already an important figure in the East Village art scene. In fact, in 1984 he won the East Village Eye's Proliferation Award for being the artist who had held the most exhibitions in New York. He is currently represented at MoMA, the Guggenheim and Metropolitan Museums in New York, the Brooklyn Museum, the National Gallery in Washington D.C., the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, the Yale University Art Gallery, the National Gallery of Modern Art in Rome, the Corcoran Gallery of Art and the Groninger Museum in Holland, as well as in numerous private collections.