In print, he has been featured in The New York Times, People, Vogue, Architectural Digest, The Face, Playboy, Forbes, New York Magazine, The Sunday Telegraph, Domus, Corriera Della Sera, Panorama, Artforum, Art in America, ARTnews, Flash Art, Arte, Arte In, and Tema Celeste. NBC even built an entire episode of the hit show Miami Vice around his artwork. He has also been profiled on 60 Minutes, Eye to Eye with Connie Chung, A Current Affair, Nightwatch (with Charlie Rose), The Oprah Winfrey Show, Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous, Nonsolomoda, West 57th, CNN, MTV, and numerous television programs throughout Europe and Japan. Kostabi’s famous collectors range from Bill Clinton to Luciano Pavarotti and include notable celebrities, dignitaries, and royalty like Lou Reed, Suzanne Vega, Brooke Shields, Axl Rose, Debbie Harry, Billy Wilder, Sylvester Stallone, Bill Gates, Aaron Spelling, Norman Lear, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and countless others. Kostabi’s permanent public works include a mural in Palazzo dei Priori in Arezzo, Italy, a large bronze sculpture in the central square of San Benedetto del Tronto, Italy, and a bronze portrait of Pope John Paul II in Velletri, Italy. The famous Italian art historian and curator, Vittorio Sgarbi, curated a vast exhibition of 150 Kostabi paintings at the Chiostro del Bramante in Rome in 2006. Retrospective exhibitions of Kostabi’s paintings have been held at the Mitsukoshi Museum in Tokyo (1992) and the Art Museum of Estonia in Tallinn (1998). Kostabi’s artwork currently appears in over 50 permanent museum collections, including the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Guggenheim Museum, the Brooklyn Museum, the National Gallery in Washington D.C., the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Los Angeles’ Museum of Contemporary Art, the National Gallery of Modern Art in Rome, and the Groninger Museum in Holland. But that’s all gone and now the Kostabi figures have iPhones.” “In the 80s, I was painting faceless figures with Walkman radios and boom boxes and backpack computers because that was the new thing back then. “I’m consciously reflecting the time we live in,” Kostabi has said. His recurring subjects include romantic love, identity, artistic expression, the impact of pop culture and social media on modern life, and the erasure of human individuality. Overall, these paintings are largely philosophical, with many positing probable truths or posing unanswerable questions about the nature of being. Kostabi’s paintings are easily identifiable by their characteristic faceless robotic figures who engage in a variety of activities that suggest poetic or metaphoric meanings. Adopting practices common to advertising, Kostabi developed his own “brand” for making art, conducting market research on what to paint and hiring creative thinkers to generate ideas and skilled technicians to paint them. Later, in the 1980s, Kostabi turned to a business model for producing his art, much as Andy Warhol had done before him. During that period, the California Institute of the Arts in Valencia was emerging as a vital center for conceptual art, which stresses the primacy of an artist’s ideas over anything else. In addition to being at the forefront of the entertainment industry, Southern California was also a burgeoning think-tank for conceptual art, which had its first wave in early twentieth-century Paris, moved on to New York City in mid-century, and found an inspired resurgence in the greater Los Angeles area in the 1970s, when Kostabi was a student at California State University, Fullerton. Kostabi’s early years in California played a significant role in shaping his artistic perspective.
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