Andrea Kostyal is a studio artist living in Hattiesburg, Mississippi. She is the co-founder of the Singing River Art Studio and the Artists Across Borders artist group. She is currently serving as the visual arts coordinator for FestivalSouth. Originally from and trained in fine art in Hungary. She has been a resident of Hattiesburg for 16 years. For the past 20 years, she has specialized in abstract, dreamlike, mixed-media cityscapes that reflect her interests in unity, diversity, and equality by emphasizing the unique architecture of different places and cultures. Her paintings have been invited to solo and group exhibitions at museums such as the Mississippi Museum of Art and Meridian Museum of Art, universities, including the University of Connecticut, The University of Southern Mississippi, William Carey University, and many galleries, and juried exhibitions regionally, nationwide, and internationally. Her paintings are represented by The Caron Gallery in Tupelo and Laurel.
She teaches workshops on her unique photo transfer technique for organizations and groups around the state. In the past couple of years, she has been commissioned by Main Street Vicksburg and The Hattiesburg Alliance for Public Art to create large murals and paint several utility boxes as public art projects, where she integrated her design with the environment of the specific location and with the viewers themselves. She received an Individual Visual Artists fellowship for her Public Art Murals from the Mississippi Arts Commission in 2024.
Statement
My dreamlike paintings are inspired by urban landscapes and nature that reflect experiences from my childhood and young adulthood. I grew up in a small town in Europe, where playing outdoors and gardening were commonplace. Later, I studied art and textiles in an artistic and culturally rich city in Hungary, filled with beautiful historic buildings and architectural masterpieces. My craving and memories of a dynamic city life, the sense of the streets’ atmosphere suggests that my paintings investigate the natural environment and its connections with manmade structures in harmony. I enjoy the careful planning of my detailed transferred photographs of street views as viewpoints in my paintings. They contain constructed forms between grids. These grids simultaneously connect shapes and forms along horizontal and vertical lines, like woven tapestry, creating rhythms, a sense of depth, and visual spacing between detailed or compendious forms. Playful bubbles permeate the whole painting in poetic movement on the canvas, reflecting my feelings and moods.
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