Cecília Costa (Portuguese, b. 1971)

Cecília Costa was born in Caldas da Rainha in 1971, lives and works in Lisbon, PT. She studied Mathematics at University of Aveiro, and Visual Arts at the ESAD (Escola Superior de Arte e Design) of Caldas da Rainha, and New Media Art at Lusófona University of Lisbon. Since taking part in the 14th Biennale of Sidney, 2004, she has participated in several international exhibitions, for instance, Portugal: Some Figures, National Institute of Fine Arts in México City, 2005; Portugal Today: Nine Solitaire Positions – MAM gallery, Wien, 2005; Young artists – MAM gallery, Salszburg, 2006. She has exhibited her work individually in Galeria Pedro Oliveira, Oporto and in Galeria Baginski, Lisbon. In more recent shows, she has presented objects, installations, sound, distorted furniture, unexpected materials such as water, ice and helium and different kinds of modifed ready-mades. She is a multidisciplinary artist and, although she has explored a variety of artistic disciplines, drawing and sculpture remain her chosen media, and both feeding on each other.

The studies in mathematics have emphasized the artist’s interest in geometrical principles and particularly in symmetry, gravity and in space dimensions. It’s a fact that we are symmetrical beings submitted to gravity and that physically inhabit the third dimension. We can see in the artist’s work that the awareness of the barrier between the second and third dimension causes an uneasiness desire for subversion. The immateriality of the line that gives body to the artist’s drawings sometimes gains properties that are proper to the material bodies of the sculpture. For example we can find weight, density and elasticity on her drawings. In one hand, Costa feels drawing as if it was a sculpture, using second dimension as if she could carve there, creating real spaces with
depth in the plane or submitting the line drawing to the same properties of matter. On the other hand, the artist subverts the functions of the objects and shuffes the properties of matter and materials of the sculptures.