Art Madrid'24 – Costa Gorel

Costa Gorel

Alemania, 1993

Costa Gorel is a Jewish artist living and working in Spain. He has grown up in the Renaissance traditions of northern Germany. His style is inspired by Austrian-German expressionism, showing the traditions of Egon Schiele, Oskar Kokoschka, Ferdinand Hodler and Emil Nolde. In his paintings Costa explores emotional and psychological states, often representing them through a figure's interactions with different spaces, objects and fashion items. The passions of his characters are expressed through architecture and compositional elements. Usually works with oil and watercolor.

The basic principles that he follows when he creates the paintings are those of the Baroque, the Renaissance, and interior design. Architecture plays a main role in his vocation as a painter because it is composed of stone and is based on the golden proportions. He tries to incorporate elements of Gothic and Baroque architecture into the everyday life of his characters, through bags and accessories that carry the DNA of the architectural heritage. He tries to show that, despite changing trends and ages, the essential things are immovable and unchanging. She uses sexuality and nudity as tools to show vulnerability, insecurity, and at the same time passion and thirst for life, which are eternally unbreakable.

His character is Orlando, from Virginia Woolf's novel of the same name, who knows the modern world, but remembers the experience of past centuries. The artist believes that the description of the inner essence of his characters corresponds perfectly with the quote from the same writer in another of her novels, "A Room of One's Own": "The beauty of the world that will so soon perish has two edges, one of laughter, the other of anguish, splitting the heart in two."