Christine Coste

Christine Coste (b. 1965) is a visual and performance artist based in Pélussin, Southern France. Her practice moves between ceramics, drawing, and performance, exploring the body through an ongoing exchange between these fields. Between 1991 and 2001, she attended live model classes led by ceramicist Nicole Giroud at the Paris Ateliers des beaux-arts. In 2001, she established her own independent ceramic studio in Paris. She is a member of the International Academy of Ceramics and regularly participates in residencies and exhibitions internationally.

Coste’s work addresses fragmentation and hybridisation, with human and animal forms merging into ambiguous figures. Faces are often obscured, suggesting bodies in states of transformation, encounter, and shifting identity.

“Around the issue of the body, Christine Coste works on the interweaving of three specific plastic fields: ceramics, drawing and performance. Her work is an incessant coming and going between these territories. Whatever the medium, the forms complement, blend and extend in such a way as to provoke disturbing points of view and perspectives for the viewer. Rarely faces, except as hooded or buried, the expression being made by the movement itself, whether in the drawings, or through the articulation of the ceramic sculptures. The volumes are fluid, covered with a kind of weft or graphic mesh that she works with oxides, or even with transfer, giving the illusion of a second skin, sometimes even close to a down or an animal shell. It is of course a question here of metamorphoses, mutations, encounters and fusions at the heart of the living world. It is a question of body and sensuality, not to say sexuality, so much the sculptures with carnal contours seem animated from the inside, and endowed with an undeniable organic power.” Text by Jean-Marc Dimanche, 2022

Visit Christine Coste’s website and Instagram page.