KOSYO  

December 9 - January 20, 2007

Martine Schneider-Speller is pleased to present an exhibition of sculptures and objects by Bulgarian artist Kosyo. Born in January 1969 in Bulgaria, Kosyo lives and works in New York. After a first exhibition in Sofia in 2002, his works have been featured in exhibitions in New York, Berlin, Montreal, Chicago, Riga, and Vienna, a.o. Kosyo studied at the National Academy of Fine Arts in Sofia and was an artist in residency at the Center for Research and Computing Arts, Visual Arts Department, at the University of California, San Diego, in 1997

beaumontpublic showed Kosyo for the first time in the group show Watch Out. His iconoclastic sculpture entitled

Hitler with Bitten Off Moustache (2004) features a traditional bust of the Führer — but in lieu of his idiosyncratic moustache, Hitler’s face displays the triumphant imprint of the artist’s teeth.

Including some 14 pieces, this solo show will present a broad overview of the artist’s work. In the trilogy Dark-Chocolate Skull, White-Chocolate Skull, and Brown-Chocolate Skull, the fractured skulls reveal the brain as an uncanny chocolate mass. The piece Mosaic Skull is made out of some 100 resin-coated pieces of mosaic, rendering a crushed vanitas which glows like a broken cerebral crystal, a contemporary phantasy prism for looking at the world. In Blown White Skull, made out of polyurethane resin, the human cranium turns into a weightless and fragile balloon, a conceptual vacuum filled with the artist’s breath and ideas.

In Squeezed Black Skull, it seems as if the mind is pressed into an almost flat book-format, ready to be shelved in an unknown reference section of a Borgesian library.

In addition to the series of skulls, the gallery presents some other ten pieces, including

Little Volcano, a painting pressed in rubber where the splendid eruption of a Volcano looks as if wrapped up in a plastic parcel, ready for sale to cultural tourism.

In most of Kosyo Minchev’s work, artistic media is never seen as given and fixed, but as continually made or produced. His process-orientated, almost performative work, delivers a political and caustic view on the world where tradition and knowledge are constantly scrutinized for new meaning.