Tamara Kostianovsky, Argentina / United States

Tamara Kostianovsky is an Argentinean-American artist based in New York, whose work addresses themes including the environment, violence, and consumer culture, often employing discarded clothing to create visceral and intricate sculptures and installations.

​​Kostianovsky received a BFA from the National School of Fine Arts, Buenos Aires, Argentina, and an MFA from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, USA. She has presented solo exhibitions at the Baker Museum, FL; Smack Mellon, Brooklyn, NY; Denver Botanic Gardens, CO; Slag Gallery, NY; RX Gallery, Paris, France; Fuller Craft Museum, Boston, MA; Ogden Contemporary Arts, and other venues. Her work has been exhibited in group exhibitions El Museo del Barrio NY; The Jewish Museum NY; Musee du Textile et de la Mode, Cholet, France; Nevada Museum of Art, NV; Bienal Sur, Buenos Aires, Argentina; Children’s Museum of Manhattan, NY, and many others. Kostianovsky is the recipient of distinguished awards such as a Guggenheim Fellowship and grants from New York Foundation for the Arts and from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation.

Using discarded textiles from clothing, furniture, and linens, I create sculptures and installations that depict or evoke severed trees and animal carcasses. These works were originally inspired by imagery I saw growing up in Argentina during the Military Junta, where the ubiquitous presence of carcasses in the markets of Buenos Aires became, in my mind, a surrogate for the State-sponsored violence dominant during that era. By focusing my work on the concept of the wound, I seek to connect personal and cultural trauma with the continuous and overwhelming violence onto the Earth’s landscape.

I follow in a tradition of artists such as Rembrandt, Goya, Soutine, Adriana Varejao, and many others from the Latin American Baroque, who have explored not just the concept of flesh as the most radical and existential way of being in this world, but who have questioned how visual depictions of torn flesh can serve as conduits to explore the political, emotional, historical, and philosophical underpinnings of life. I am particularly thrilled to create monumental work for my first solo institutional exhibition in Europe at the Musée de la Chasse et de la Nature, no less than at Atelier 11 Cité Falguière - the studio where Chaim Soutine painted his celebrated vibrant carcasses of cattle. The space remains unchanged since he last used it in the early 20th Century and I am counting on channeling the latent energy of the mystical atelier to expose the visceral nature of life that obsessed him and to explore new models of regeneration and rebirth.

​With the support of RX&SLAG, Paris - New York and of the Musée de la Chasse et de la Nature, during her residency with L'AiR Arts at Atelier 11 in February 2024, Tamara will be working on monumental works to be exhibited in her first institutional solo exhibition in France at the Musée de la Chasse et de la Nature, to open in April 2024.

Portrait of Tamara Kostianovsky at Atelier 11 by Lara Al-Gubory