Anne-Lise Coste

NoguerasBlanchard is proud to present the second exhibition in the gallery of Anne-Lise Coste (Marseille, 1973). In relation to her first exhibition France, informed by a reactionary opposition to her country’s social policy and centered around the techniques of drawing and graffiti, Save Picasso directs a critique towards the comercialization of culture through the professionalization of art, specifically, the use and abuse of artists in marketing strategies and advertising campaigns, and at the same time, artists’ collaborations with them.

In this exhibition, Anne-Lise Coste engages the viewer in her imaginary world through a series of paintings on the pages of finantial newspapers and free publications. Deliberately refusing llinguistic and artistic conventions, she adopts a painterly style that references the Art Brut artists, while she asserts her position with anti-authoritarian slogans (Professionalization is killing art) or seemingly hazardous statements (You care for me I care for you) imbued with a subtle naif humour. Language, in constant dialogue with painting and other media, occupies a pivotal position in her ouvre: poems, notes, literary extracts, metaphors, the repetition of words and sentences… The confessional mood and an underlying expressionism are at the core of a fragmentary narrative which contsantly shifts focus from figures of speech to visual idiom, from text to form, from form to meaning.

The second part of the exhibition features the installation Jamais, jamais, jamais (2008). In a dark room with black walls Coste has recreated a specific environment with elements from her personal cosmology, candles, lightbulbs, newspaper pages.. A sculpture made with recycled materials represents Poor man, a generic character that formally resembles the crude nature of totemic and primitivist sculptures, a tendency visible in the iconography of Vanguard artists such as Jean Dubuffet o Jean-Michel Basquiat. Through her art, Anne-Lise Coste creates a fantasy world and proposes a form of pragmatic activism that seeks to establish fragile links between individual sensibilities and the stereotypes of reality, as these are reflected in the dominant social and political structures.

Anne-Lise Coste’s recent exhibitions include: Words Fail Me, MoCAD Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, USA; Destroy Athens, I Athens Biennial (2007); Learn to Read, Tate Modern, London (2007); COSMIC Dreams, Centro Cultural Andratx, Mallorca (2007); Overtake, Glucksman Gallery, Cork, Ireland (2007); Aller / Retour 2, Centre Culturel Suisse, Paris (2006); Jugend von Heute, Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt (2006); Midnight Walkers, Kunsthaus Baselland, Basel (2006); Centre d’ Art Neûchatel, Switzerland (2006); You-me, Kunsthalle Saint-Gallen, Switzerland (2006); loin, loin, loin, Kunsthaus Glarus, Switzerland.

Her projects for 2008 include exhibitions in the Fundacion Serralves, Oporto and the FRAC Loire.

Anne-Lise Coste lives in Zurich and Palma de Mallorca.