Mark Kostabi is an artist who has succeeded in creating a pictorial language that is both unique and instantly recognizable. His works depict a universe populated by faceless figures, immersed in luminous and suspended spaces where color, form, and symbol coexist in perfect harmony. These presences interact with the environments they inhabit they occupy and experience them. They are not static figures but dynamic, vital bodies.

In his visual world, the “Everyman” loses individual traits to become an archetype a universal presence reflecting the contemporary condition, poised between conformity and the yearning for freedom. These bodies, only seemingly anonymous and rendered with almost sculptural precision, do not represent absence, but the potential for every identity. They are surfaces upon which the viewer can project themselves blank pages open to imagination.

Kostabi constructs his compositions with solid colors, sharp contrasts, essential perspectives, and almost theatrical lighting, amplifying the evocative dimension of the image and creating points of tension and focus within the scene. His figures engage in dialogue with space and are often accompanied by distinctive elements: musical instruments, cats, geometric shapes. At times, they transform, sprouting wings like modern angels. Frequently, they appear within contexts that recall the works of other artists, thus merging his own language with theirs. All of this contributes to defining a narrative that is unmistakably his own.

Kostabi Universe is an invitation to step into this visual world, where echoes of de Chirico and Pop Art are transformed by the artist into a personal, ironic, and critical language one that unites memory and contemporaneity in a constantly relevant key.

The works presented in this online exhibition fully embody this language. The brilliance of the colors and the precision of the surfaces enhance the clarity of the forms and the chromatic depth, giving viewers the sense of standing before suspended, luminous, and vibrant visions. Each painting thus becomes a fragment of the Kostabi Universe: a portal into the artist’s imagination, where painting does not merely represent the world it reinvents it.

“First and foremost, there are your typical, essential traits of the Kostabi style: a highly refined irony, a lateral gaze on the world, immersion in the hyper-pop universe, the legacy and innovation of Warholism, the artist’s stance toward the art system (paradoxically, you are one of the most individual artists, even though your work emerges from a factory like process), a progressive shift toward so-called ‘low practices,’ and an exceptionally high degree of communicability. […] These new paintings contain the familiar elements that make you, dear Mark, an unmistakable artist.”


- Luca Beatrice (Mark Kostabi: Angels, Skira Editore, Milano, 1999)