TAMARA KOSTIANOVSKY. “MOVED BY FORCES” AT SLAG&RX NEW YORK
Until October 25, 2025, SLAG&RX New York presents Moved by Forces, the latest solo exhibition by Tamara Kostianovsky, an Argentine-American artist whose practice lies at the intersection of ecology, feminism, and material memory. The exhibition offers an immersive exploration of her research, where sculpture becomes a tool for examining the relationships between body, nature, and social structure, through a masterful use of fabric as a living, symbolic flesh.
At the core of the exhibition is a series of five new textile “carcass” sculptures. Two of these, inspired by the Caryatids of classical architecture, take the form of freestanding figures that subvert their original function as supports: no longer columns, but autonomous presences embodying both strength and fragility. These works engage in dialogue with Narcissus, a complex installation in which a textile reproduction of a tree stump grows out of a network of multicolored roots, simulating an organic process of expansion and interconnection. Conceived during Kostianovsky’s residency as Martin Shallenberger Artist-in-Residence and first presented at the Cheekwood Museum in Nashville in 2025, Narcissus expands the gallery space, evoking both urban networks and neural pathways, and suggesting a parallel between natural and cognitive matter.
The theme of transformation runs throughout the exhibition and finds its culmination in works such as Colossus and Sculptural Group, where the human figure mutates into a hybrid vessel populated with botanical and avian motifs. In this metamorphosis, the female body becomes a vehicle for change and generative force, embedded within a discourse that intertwines mythology, architecture, and contemporary feminist thought. The deliberate arrangement of the sculptures – distributed across distinct yet dialogic environments – underscores the dialectic between opposites: solidity and dissolution, material and void. This spatial configuration invites the viewer to experience the works physically and perceptually, engaging with them in contrasting yet complementary settings.
The suspended “carcasses” introduce a reflection on the relationship between life and matter in an almost alchemical sense. The artist describes this process as a “botanical revolution of the flesh” – a rebirth of the body through the metamorphosis of fabric, which becomes both a second skin and a tangible memory of the self. Each fragment of textile originates from Kostianovsky’s personal wardrobe, transforming clothing into relic, intimate archive, and political statement at once.
Within this tension between horror and beauty, vitality and decay, Kostianovsky reconfigures corporeality as an unstable terrain of identity, desire, and disintegration.
Her practice, explicitly political, interweaves the violent histories of Latin America with contemporary U.S. consumerism, elaborating a critique that fuses colonial memory with the culture of waste. In her works, analogies between slaughtered animals and violence against the female body emerge as both metaphor and testimony, revealing an ongoing dialogue with the legacy of feminist artists who inscribed the body into the language of art. By repurposing her own clothing, Kostianovsky renews the gesture of self-representation, resisting the production cycles of consumer society while addressing the entanglements of gender, economy, and ecology.
Moved by Forces thus unfolds as a visual ecosystem in which the human and vegetal bodies intertwine, generating a hybrid landscape suspended between metamorphosis and memory. It is an invitation to recognize the web of connections that binds the human and the non-human, life and decay, matter and language.
The Artist – Tamara Kostianovsky lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. She earned a BFA from the Prilidiano Pueyrredón National School of Fine Arts in Buenos Aires and a Master of Fine Arts from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia. Her work, often created with discarded garments, investigates the subtleties of violence and its normalization within contemporary visual culture, oscillating between the softness of material and the brutality of subject matter.
Her work has been exhibited in major international institutions including the Royal Academy, London, UK; the Brooklyn Museum, NY; the Musée de la Chasse et de la Nature, Paris, FR; the Cheekwood Museum, TN; the Baker Museum, FL; the Denver Botanic Gardens, CO; Smack Mellon, NY; the Fuller Craft Museum, MA; Ogden Contemporary Arts, UT; UMOCA, UT; El Museo del Barrio, NY; the Jewish Museum, NY; the Nevada Museum of Art, NV; the Musée du Textile et de la Mode, FR; the Whyte Museum of the Canadian Rockies, Banff, Alberta, CA; the Newport Art Museum, RI; the Kunsthalle Trier, DE; the Les Franciscaines Art Center, FR; and the Staten Island Museum of Art, NY, among others.
Kostianovsky is the recipient of numerous prestigious awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, and grants from the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, the Virginia A. Groot Foundation, the Sustainable Arts Foundation, and the Puffin Foundation. Her selected residencies include Yaddo, L’AiR Arts, Wave Hill Gardens, LMCC, Socrates Sculpture Park, and Franconia Sculpture Park. In 2025–2026, her forthcoming exhibitions include the Chicago Architecture Biennial (2025), the 21C Museum in Cincinnati, OH (2025), the Mauritshuis Museum in The Hague, NL (2026), the Fondazione MDG II Palazzo Valier, Venice, IT (2026), the Brandywine Art Museum, PA (2026), and the Musée des Confluences, Lyon, FR (2026).
