“Everything is a ruin in process and a ruin is a melancholy marker of the passage of time in both directions.” –Dr. Gerry Coulter, EuroArt Magazine, 2008

AVA is pleased to announce the opening of Poor Architect by New York–based painter Tom Costa. The past few years have found Costa exploring the tragicomic side to various contemporary struggles. His latest expression of this portrays architecture in ruin. Dilapidated buildings delicately stand amid luminous, romantic landscapes.

Each painting shows evidence of the human hand long gone. Creation beautifully obliterated by an indifferent landscape; not unlike the fate of the work itself or the current state of architecture in New York. Shaped canvases reference the geometry of stable architecture and hint toward a sacred alter. Costa revels in the failure of the present. The failure of modernism and its ideals.

This is Tom Costa’s second solo exhibition in New York. His first was in 2005 at Clementine Gallery.