For a while now, Anne-Lise Coste has not purchased new canvases or art supplies, Instead, she is using what is left at the studio, picking up objects on the street, and repurposing the plastic packaging of daily purchases. Spray in hand, Coste does not beat around the bush. Slurs, charged and cuss words, unabashed statements are written on whatever object she gets hold on. Crammed together on the wall, they come off as a frontal and explicit declaration of anger and refusal. As curator Ines Goldbach writes about her, Coste’s work is “an almost activist, but above all unvarnished and direct artistic practice that seems to recognise society at its very core while simultaneously paying attention to what is concealed.”

Anne-Lise Coste has worked with spray painting as a way of engaging with social and political issues since the beginning of her artistic career. In her practice, there is a kind of theatrical double of the artwork as both thing and sign. For the thing in art is no longer a thing, it becomes something else, bigger than life, a channel of expression that forsakes its thing quality without ever becoming a clearly identifiable sign or something that could be conclusively read for its meaning. In this way, her body of work always points back to its own materiality, and in turn comes to the fore as potentially significant, inviting new interpretations. Confronting the viewer reflexively and provocatively, Coste’s work is not necessarily defined by how the viewer commands over the object, but, on the contrary, presents an interruption of any asymmetrical subject-object relation to galvanise the viewer politically.