French painter and poet.
The work of Anne-Lise Coste is an outpouring signalling emergency. Forgoing preparatory sketches or plans, refusing to look back or repent, gesture and language are hurled across different mediums like so many ways to alert us to the paradoxes of life under surveillance, life constrained, abused, wounded, but where a power may be found in love.
A.-L. Coste studied at the fine arts schools of Marseille and Zurich, before relocating to New York for five years and then moving, in 2014, to the Cévennes, where they lived until 2021. The artist works hard, investing themself wholly in each project to render each unique. Since 2021 they have lived and worked in Sète.

The oeuvre of A.-L. Coste includes works on loose canvas, with lines traced using airbrush and spray-paint, oil pastels or coloured pencils; lithographs; neon pieces and stretched canvas works (though these are somewhat rarer) as well as site-specific and ephemeral projects. Often, these pieces are manifestos, their themes the daily injustices people face: fascism, male chauvinism, the patriarchy, racism, police violence and all kinds of oppression, along with simple selfishness, lack of empathy, lack of solidarity. Personal life and life in society are one and the same – with each gesture, each display, the artist exposes themself, while never explicitly referring to individuals or to themself. Their revolts, like wounds, seem to burst forth spontaneously, and yet remain considered and careful. A.-L. Coste assesses the consequences, the accuracy, the reception of their actions. They doubt, then dare, in one gesture, approaching life’s celebratory moments, its instances of tenderness and love, with the same spontaneity. We must dare to take the risk, for “when we obsess over the side effects, we forget to notice the weather”, and fall silent.
In 2013 the artist responded to Guernica (1937) by Pablo Picasso (1881-1973) with a series of twelve canvases that are permeated with the same anti-war anguish as the original. A.-L. Coste’s airbrush contours Guernica’s cries and its lightbulbs, its feet and its faces, but isolates them, reframes them. They are fragmented and multiplied, and so take on a different presence. We no longer see the story of a singular event, but a series of universal and contemporary icons, of bombs, drones, torture and distress.

Handwritten words clumsily scrawled, drawings filling up their pages, vivid colours, skulls, vases that might be silhouettes: A.-L. Coste is prolific, setting sign, colour and language loose across their work. The imagination reigns, nourished by a political conscience and a hunger for social justice. The works’ violence is commensurate with the violence all around us, endured daily and trivialised in society. Though the brushstrokes may appear naïve, the subjects they treat are anything but, and though we may find irony wielded to better denounce, there is no sarcasm here. Exhibition titles evoke the atmosphere into which the artist wishes to plunge viewers: No God, No Boss, No Husband; Poème, Pute, Police; BAZOOKA, La Vie en rose. This atmosphere surrounds us and yet compels us to keep on dancing despite it.
A.-L. Coste has recently started to produce more writings and public lectures as part of their work, signalling a shift away from object and place towards a more immediate form with more directly felt effects. Rassemblement National ; Toutes des putes violées; Dans ton cul, suce avale; Ça pue Alain; Oui Non; Genre Nique Tout; Tu vois ce que je veux dire; Bière et Brise; Police Partout; Kolon de français françaises: the titles of the performed texts are violent, raw and straightforward. These slogans compel us never to forget, never to pretend, to remain aware of differing perspectives and their consequences.

A.-L. Coste is represented in numerous public collections in France, including the Centre national des arts plastiques and the MRAC de Sérignan, in the Netherlands (Stedelijk Museum, Museum Arnhem, etc.), Switzerland (Migros Museum) and Spain (MACBA). They are represented by the Galerie Elisabeth & Reinhard Hauff in Stuttgart, Ellen de Bruijne Projects in Amsterdam, Nogueras Blanchard in Madrid and Lullin + Ferrari in Zurich.

Text by Pauline Faure.

Translated from the French by Flora Hibberd.

A biography produced as part of the +1 programme.
© Archives of Women Artists, Research and Exhibitions, 2024.



Image: Anne-Lise Coste: „Je t’aime“, 2021, spray paint on canvas, approx. 207 × 165 cm. Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Elisabeth & Reinhard Hauff.