Artists

Adriano Costa

Press release

Emalin is pleased to present ax-d. us. t, Adriano Costa’s first solo exhibition with the gallery. The artist’s project draws on the context of the historical Clerk’s House, where the exhibition unfolds, as well as the cemetery grounds of St Leonard’s Church on which the house stands and whose tombstones are built into its walls. With this as his starting point, Costa engages the built and the historical with his sculptural vocabulary that makes tangible the transmutation of value into base material, of life into spirit and of body into dust.

The exhibition’s title, ax-d. us. t, is a wordplay about the axis of distance between ‘us’ – you and I – contained within the word ‘dust’. Costa’s sculptural focus on detritus and passing is saturated with spirituality: he references the sacred books of Christianity, the biblical prophecy of the world turning from dust to dust, as seen in the churchyard outside. In his native São Paulo, he follows his spiritual guides of Candomblé to pay respect to the stuff from which we are made, the stuff into which we turn, the dead and the living, the trash and the gold, what they sell for and what we give to buy them.