About

Twelve Living Rooms is the artist’s institutional debut at the Art No Bounds Museum in Hangzhou, China. It features a series of large-format works growing from intersections of art, design, and heritage. Engaged with reproduction—from manufacturing to translation—these ambitious works see Kosc address the Chinese Zodiac from an international perspective, reaffirming its significance in both Chinese and global culture.

Imagining a stir-crazy artist locked within a museum collection, Kosc depicts elaborate assemblage sculptures resembling animals, constructed from hunting trophies, Baroque taxidermy, and components of contemporary furniture from the 1960s to the present. Hyperrealistic textures are in tense relation with abstract structures; like diagrams or exploded renderings, they profess their real, surreal, or hyperreal origins.

Meticulously sourced from museum collections, the furniture selected for these works remains largely unaltered, reflecting a careful attention to its features and forms. As a painter, Kosc adopts an almost curatorial approach—one which pays fidelity to these objects as ones deserving admiration. In some respects, this series is an homage to their original creators. But through re-situation and creative reinterpretation, Kosc draws out the disjunct harmonies which echo beyond design, and through nature itself. Ettore Sottsass’s iconic Carlton room divider appears upended by a Celebes crested macaque, Paul T Frankl’s Skyscraper Bookcase is enjoyed by four rodents, and Frank Gehry’s Wiggle Side Chair of 1972 props up a specimen of a taipan—gently mimicking its coils.

These paintings inhabit an ambiguous zone shared by the human and animal worlds; they are suspended between a love of nature in all its inherent creativity, and a fascination with its often alluring (but sometimes monstrous) objectification. This ambiguity is shared also between each of us, as our stories and their meanings evolve in cultural exchange. Kosc takes to the animal signs of the Zodiac with a sensitivity to its extraordinary history, and its proliferation in international contexts, considering the conflicts and transformative beauty emergent from their translation. As design and nature rhyme together, there is a poetry to the way that our most treasured myths return, revived and reinterpreted, speaking across history and geography to the contemporary moment.