Claudio Costa Biography
Claudio Costa (Tirana, 22 June 1942 – Genoa, 2 July 1995) was an Italian artist. Raised in Liguria, in Chiavari, in 1960 he moved to Milan where he studied architecture at the Polytechnic. In Paris in 1964, thanks to a scholarship won with his chalcographic works, he met Marcel Duchamp. In 1969 he had his first solo exhibition at the La Bertesca gallery in Genoa. The travels made in the seventies (New Zealand, Africa) direct his work towards primitive cultures, in a parallel turn to his own childhood and the childhood of the world. In 1975, in line with the opening towards material culture that occurred in Italy in the mid-seventies, he organized with Aurelio Caminati the Museum of Active Anthropology of Monteghirfo (Favale di Malvaro), a traditional house where he recovered, cataloged using the language of the place and exhibits the objects that belonged to it, carrying out a job, ideally close to that of Christian Boltanski, of reconstructing individual and collective memory, a recontextualisation opposed to Duchampian decontextualisation. After a series of exhibitions in Germany he is present at Documenta 6 in Kassel. In the eighties, on a path away from traditional psychoanalysis and structuralism, he returned to painting (these were the years of the Transavantgarde), to the primitivism and shamanism of Beuys; it is a recovery of manual skills and experience, in opposition to that cold dimension theorized by McLuhan and, again, to the pre-eminence of the conceptual. It is in this sense that that work in regress arises (a phrase taken from Joyce's work in progress), theorized since 1976, which characterizes Costa's work: a return to the myth, to the symbolic, to the self, also through self-citations, a return that , in a fully postmodern sense, has little to do with the reconstructions made by history. In 1986 he exhibited the work entitled Bottle Diva (for a Museum of Alchemy) at the Venice Biennale in the "Art and Alchemy" section curated by Arturo Schwarz. Costa's work is also linked to the former psychiatric hospital of Quarto dei Mille where, in collaboration with the psychiatrist Antonio Slavich, he organized an art therapy laboratory. At the former OP in Quarto Costa he has worked as a therapist since 1986, the Active Museum of Unconscious Forms was established in 1992. Since 1986 with Jakob de Chirico, Angelica Thomas, Antonino Bove and Igor Sacharov Ross he has been the protagonist of the Kraftzellen - Cellule di Energia group. Costa's activity in Quarto further underlines that search for "non-normality" which does not ignore personal experiences and which has been conducted in recent years in parallel with a museum project dedicated to cultural exchanges between African artists and Western artists. In the early 90s he also dedicated himself to Mail art. The Quarto museum complex, with its collection of works by professional artists (among others Aurelio Caminati and Giannetto Fieschi) and hospital patients, is commonly considered by critics to be a single work by the artist himself.
