Solo Exhibition by Midia Coste
Artist, painter, player.
The quote “The aeon is a child at play with couloured balls” (Heraclite/ paraphrased by Terence McKenna) is the Leitmotif of Midia Coste’s (*1981) expo “Spieltrieb”, which translated from German means as much as “play instinct”. The exposition at 3 Bays Gallery will be featuring paintings, photographs and a selection of the artist’s video work between 2022 and 2024.
Being a child of the 1980ies, Midia Coste witnessed the transition of her homecountry Romania from a rural, socialist society into capitalism. As the beginning of this transition, starting with the Romanian Revolution in 1989, coincided with the beginning of her adolescence, Midia’s artistic oeuvre has to be seen in correlation with the impressions she had during summer holidays back in Constanza, her city of birth, from which she and her family left to Germany in 1984. This port city at the Black Sea Coast, originally a Greek settlement from the 6th century B.C. is the ever shifting imaginary maze she enters to revisit scenes and sceneries of her childhood.
The natural setting at the outskirts of the city, which until the mid-nineties was a predominantly undeveloped marine marsh-land, was a place of ecological bliss. Days spent in swimsuit roaming the savanna-like landscape, paired with regular introductions into the local biosphere from her mother’s side are one of the elements that constitute her bond with the natural and especially the marine world, and her aesthetic perception. Seashells, wild flowers and silence, only disturbed by the soft crashing of the waves, become a paradise stage for her imagination to unfold. Every additional day of immersion in the sun-drenched environment is dissolving the boundaries between internal and external reality, so that concrete things like pebbles, drift wood or sea animals washed up ashore, turn into an abstract, etheric substance from which to remould shapes and create colour-compositions. This childlike, oblivious freedom is eliminated on a personal level by the progression into adulthood in direct proportion to the region’s natural wilderness being driven back by the accelerated urban development that capitalism is imposing on her country.
The artistic counterstrike to this development is a romantic affiliation with the past. References to graeco-roman antiquity like amphoras, semi-circular arches or self-portraits in contrapost are recurring motives used to transpose herself to ancient times, objects like mirrors, marbles, rubber balls, ribbon sticks are animated allies to defy the confinements of adult life. Play becomes the gateway to an ancestral place, the creative drift that transcends back to the beginning of human history.
But play is also bestowed a mystical dimension upon, the serenity of a universe unfolding, with all its spiralling structures, planetary dances and rhythmic shuffling of pulsars. It’s those synesthetic flashbacks from her own childhood, the reminiscence of a world still young, that Midia is trying to capture in her artworks.
