Mark KOSTABI

Mark Kostabi – Biography, Screenprints and Original Prints

Mark Kostabi (born Kalev Mark Kostabi in Los Angeles in 1960) is an American painter, sculptor and composer of Estonian parentage. He moved to New York in 1982, made his name in the East Village galleries of the mid-1980s and in 1988 set up Kostabi World, a Manhattan studio in which assistants paint his pictures from ideas he approves. His faceless figures, borrowings from art history and record sleeves – Guns N’ Roses’ Use Your Illusion, the Ramones’ ¡Adios Amigos! – made him one of the most debated figures of late twentieth-century contemporary art. Since 1996 he has divided his time between New York and Rome, and his work also includes original screenprints issued in small, signed editions.

At Le Coin des Arts we hold several 2014 screenprints by Kostabi published by Galerie-F Edition, among them Sans titre (Untitled) and Top Floor Terpsichore. Each comes from an edition of 50, is numbered and is signed in pencil by the artist; like every print we offer, they were chosen for the quality of the impression, the edition, the provenance and the condition of the sheet.

Whittier, Fullerton and a Musical Household

Kostabi was born on 27 November 1960 in Los Angeles to Kaljo and Rita Kostabi, Estonian émigrés, and grew up in Whittier, east of the city. Both parents were musicians and his mother taught the piano; he began drawing at six and the piano at about twelve, and the two disciplines have run side by side ever since. He studied drawing and painting at California State University, Fullerton. Critics have long traced his smooth, featureless figures back to the metaphysical piazzas of Giorgio de Chirico and the tubular bodies of Fernand Léger. Early work on paper from these years is now in public hands: a pastel of 1980, Nose Off – Self Portrait, belongs to the Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.

The East Village Years, 1982-1988

Arriving in New York in 1982, Kostabi was, by 1984, one of the best-known names in the East Village, the district of shopfront galleries where graffiti, Neo-Expressionism and late Pop rubbed shoulders. The East Village Eye gave him a tongue-in-cheek ‘Proliferation Prize’ for taking part in more exhibitions than any other New York artist. In the middle of the decade he published a series of provocative self-interviews on art as a commodity, turning himself into a media character as much as a painter. From 1987 his work was being shown not only in New York and across the United States but also in Japan, Germany and Australia. An ink drawing of 1984, Decoration Day, is today in the Phoenix Art Museum, part of the Dorothy and Herbert Vogel gift ‘Fifty Works for Fifty States’.

Kostabi World: the Studio as Statement

Founded in 1988, Kostabi World openly employs painting assistants and so-called ‘idea people’. Writing in 1991, the journalist Judd Tully described the set-up: a three-storey building on Manhattan’s West Side, a team adapting images from art-history books into Kostabi-style drawings, a committee including the artist that approved or rejected them, and some twenty painters who transferred the designs to canvas. Kostabi then signed and dated the accepted paintings on the reverse. Pushing Warhol’s Factory to its logical end, the method provoked as much as it fascinated. Japanese buyers took an interest, and in 1992 the Mitsukoshi Museum in Tokyo mounted a retrospective. His images reached a global audience on the sleeves of Guns N’ Roses’ Use Your Illusion (1991) and the Ramones’ ¡Adios Amigos! (1995).

Tully’s figures give a measure of the enterprise. A summer crew could complete up to ten oils a week; factory canvases then fetched roughly $7,000 to $20,000; overheads ran to some $100,000 a month, and Kostabi claimed $2 million in income for the previous year. Rejected canvases were recycled as the backs of new pictures, so that a single stretcher might carry two paintings. Critics divided sharply over whether this was a satire on the art market or simply a business, and the question has followed him ever since, through television appearances, a decade of advice columns for Artnet and several documentaries, from Peter Bach’s Bottom Line: The Kostabi Phenomenon to Sabrina Digregorio’s Full Circle: The Kostabi Story. For the collector, the practical lesson is simple: with Kostabi, documentation matters as much as the image.

Rome, Tallinn and the Piano

Recognition in Italy came in the early 1990s, and in 1996 Kostabi took a second home in Rome; he has divided his time between Italy and the United States ever since. In 2006 the critic Vittorio Sgarbi hung 150 paintings at the Chiostro del Bramante in Rome, and Italian commissions followed: a mural for the Palazzo dei Priori in Arezzo, a bronze at San Benedetto del Tronto and a bronze portrait of Pope John Paul II at Velletri. In 1998 the Art Museum of Estonia in Tallinn, in his parents’ homeland, gave him a retrospective, and the same year saw his first piano album, I Did It Steinway; his compositions have since been performed by the Estonian National Symphony Orchestra. From 2000 to 2010 he wrote the ‘Ask Mark Kostabi’ advice column for Artnet. More than a hundred works were shown at the Vaccheria in Rome’s EUR district in From Pop to Eternity (12 September 2025 – 29 March 2026).

Kostabi in Print: the Screenprints

Reproduction and circulation are built into Kostabi’s project: the same motif travels from canvas to record sleeve, to design objects – a Swatch watch, Alessi vases, Rosenthal espresso cups – and to the printed sheet. His preferred print medium is the screenprint, whose flat, saturated colour suits his clean contours. The 2014 Galerie-F Edition screenprints are editioned at 50, numbered and signed in pencil; the sheet of Sans titre, for instance, measures 84.5 x 61.5 cm with an image of 65.5 x 50 cm, and is accompanied by a certificate of authenticity. Earlier screenprints from the 1980s and 1990s also appear on the market, some in editions approaching 300.

As far as we have been able to establish, no catalogue raisonné of Kostabi’s prints has been published. A sheet is therefore best identified by title, year, publisher, edition and dimensions rather than by a catalogue number. For what separates an original print from a reproduction, see what is an original print.

Collecting Mark Kostabi Prints: a Buyer’s Guide

Edition and numbering. Check the pencil numbering (28/50, say) against the publisher’s stated edition – 50 for the 2014 Galerie-F screenprints. See the printing.

Signature. Our impressions are hand-signed in pencil; a signature printed within the image is not the same thing.

The studio question. Kostabi has acknowledged his use of assistants since 1988. It does not undermine a work he has approved and signed, but it makes provenance and paperwork all the more important.

A name to watch. Do not confuse Mark Kostabi with Paul Kostabi, another artist whose screenprints also come up for sale.

Posters and merchandise. Exhibition posters, album artwork and licensed objects reproduce his images by offset or industrial means; they are not original prints.

Condition. Large flat areas of screenprinted colour scuff and fade easily. Look for full margins with no creases or light-staining, and frame behind UV-filtering glazing – see our framing service and our authenticity guarantee.

We choose Kostabi’s screenprints for the freshness of the colour and the quality of their documentation. To explore Pop and figurative printmaking further, see Roy Lichtenstein, Enrico Baj, Valerio Adami, Arman and Robert Combas, or browse our contemporary art and prints and lithographs.

Sources and further reading

John-Paul Stonard, ‘Kostabi, Mark’, The Grove Encyclopedia of American Art, Oxford University Press, 2011 · Baird Jones, Mark Kostabi and the East Village Scene, 1983-1987, Matteo Editore, 2002 · Juliet Art Magazine – Mark Kostabi, artist and composer (2024) · Judd Tully – Painting by the Numbers (1991) · Finestre sull’Arte – From Pop to Eternity, Rome (2025) · Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art – Nose Off, Self Portrait