Mark Kostabi - Embracing the Future, 2021

Mark Kostabi
Embracing the Future, 2021

Serigraph, 52/100
13¾ × 13¾ inches (34.9 × 34.9 cm)
16 × 15¾ inches (40.6 × 40 cm) framed
Light brown frame

Mark Kostabi arrived in New York in 1982 and proceeded to make himself impossible to ignore — part painter, part provocateur, part performance, operating a studio factory he called Kostabi World that hired artists to execute works he would sign, then daring the art world to object. The audacity was the point. Embracing the Future belongs to the lithographic side of a practice that always understood multiples as democratization rather than dilution: the edition as argument, the signed and numbered print as a direct line between the artist's mythology and a wider public. The image — Kostabi's signature faceless figures, featureless and universal, turned toward one another in an act of anticipation or surrender — carries the full weight of his central preoccupation: what it means to be human when the human face has been removed from the equation. Number 52 of 100.