Art in America has published a fantastic review of Costa’s Conceptualism and Other Fictions. Here are some of our favorite quotes (highlighting some of the aspects we love about Costa’s work):

“Cumulatively, the book presents a complex portrait of Costa as artist and critic, as well as an alternative genealogy of his times—one that draws directly on his relationships, travels, and artistic experiments.” 

[…]

“The sophistication of this project is perhaps due in part to the artists’ position outside acknowledged contemporary art centers like New York and Paris. Rather than simply accept a status as always already derivative of developments elsewhere, Costa and others turned their displacement into an advantage in the creation of new artistic forms.” 

[…]

“To characterize Costa’s own career as peripatetic would be to neglect the geopolitical and personal traumas that have shaped his production: the 1966 coup in Argentina, for example, which no doubt precipitated his departure for New York, or the loss of key friends such as Oiticica (1980, heart attack), Mendieta (1985, a mysterious thirty-three-story fall), and Burton (1989, AIDS). Another biographical theme that has surely shaped Costa’s vision is his perpetual de-centering of himself as artist through strategies of collaboration and (re)invention. This gem of a publication does a huge service in opening Costa’s production to the world, revealing an artist whose very hybridity makes him crucial to the precarious present.”

Download full Costa Conceptualism Art in America review