Adriano Costa | Comida (2024)

Adriano Costa | Comida (2024)[[specs start]] White rice, black beans, silkscreen on plastic bags, elastic band Approx. 17 x 21 x 5cm Edition of 100, accompanied by a signed and numbered certificate Please note that this edition can also be purchased with an artist designed T Shirt. [[specs end]] [[work start]] About the work Adriano Costa has created Comida, 2024 especially for Whitechapel Gallery to accompany the exhibition Lygia Clark: The I and the You, 2 Oct 2024 12 Jan 2025.

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White rice, black beans, silkscreen on plastic bags, elastic band
Approx. 17 x 21 x 5cm
Edition of 100, accompanied by a signed and numbered certificate

Please note that this edition can also be purchased with an artist designed T-Shirt.

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About the work

Adriano Costa has created Comida, 2024 especially for Whitechapel Gallery to accompany the exhibition Lygia Clark: The I and the You, 2 Oct 2024 – 12 Jan 2025.

Adriano Costa’s edition for Whitechapel Gallery, relates to Lydia Clark’s ‘BICHOS’ and embodies several important aspects of Clark’s work. For Costa, Clark represents the punk ethos, emphasised by the Do It Yourself (DIY) message in the logo. In the spirit of Lygia Clark the artwork must be activated by the audience. Rice and beans are the most popular Brazilian food. For Costa, the black and white colours strongly influence the psyche and mixing these colours symbolises equality. Adriano is following the pop culture aspects of rice and beans and the black and white theme.

The final phase of Lygia’s Clark’s work, the “not art” period, focuses on generating feelings, thoughts, and reactions through physical interactions between elements like plastic, inflatable volumes filled with air or water, and the ingestion of food such as honey. One of our deepest bodily experiences is eating. The concept of ‘Comida’ meaning food, in Portuguese is similar: visitors of the gallery buy the rice and beans, cook and eat them. The material remaining of the works, after the rice and beans have been consumed by the edition buyers, would be the empty printed plastic bags, which could then be displayed on a wall in the person’s home.

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About the artist

Adriano Costa (b. 1975, São Paulo, Brazil) lives and works in São Paulo. Costa works in sculpture, installation and painting to expose the inherent back-end of objects and our attachment to their contexts. His use of everyday materials explores notions of value, form and habit. Working with the belief that all is already there, he finds the beauty and importance of every kind of material to be readily present, and tugs on it through composition: the objects’ spirituality attended to and their disagreements resolved. His focus is placed on the inherent value and importance of each object – a running argument against the hierarchy of materials.

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Selected exhibitions

Recent solo exhibitions include: Emalin, ‘ax-d. us. t’, (London, UK, 2024); A Sud, ‘All fishermen know about u(s)', (Pescara, Italy, 2023); Mendes Wood, ‘MILK OF SLUMS - RUA DOS CACIQUES’, (New York, US, 2023); Emalin, ‘YOUR WORK AND ITS CONSEQUENCES’, (London, UK, 2022); Terzo Fronte, ‘H U M A N O N L Y', (Rome, Italy, 2022); Mendes Wood DM, 'Flowers and holes (glory)', (São Paulo, Brazil, 2021); Castiglioni, ‘Done 2 Deserve This’, (Milan, Italy, 2019).

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Whitechapel Gallery editions are generously donated by the artists. All proceeds from the sale of these works directly support our exhibition and education programmes. As is traditional in editions publishing, prices will rise as an edition starts to sell out. 

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The purchase of this edition is subject to resale restrictions. See Terms and Conditions at point of sale.