> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://www.urgentmatter.press/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # Nicola Costantino turns provocative art practice toward ceramic flowers - URL: https://www.urgentmatter.press/nicola-costantino-turns-provocative-art-practice-toward-ceramic-flowers/ - Published: 2026-11-01T18:23:14.000Z - Updated: 2026-11-01T18:23:14.000Z - Description: Costantino said President Javier Milei's government is in "a battle against cultural artists." - Author: Adam Schrader - Tags: Shows and Exhibitions, #public-access Nicola Costantino, an Argentine artist whose early work included aluminum casts of mummified pigs and a corset made from silicone casts of men's nipples, is turning to ceramic flowers for her latest New York exhibition. The show, "Where Time Stands Still," [opens at L'SPACE Gallery](https://www.lspacegallery.com/nicola-constantino.html?ref=urgentmatter.press) in Chelsea on November 5. "Today, I think that the urgent thing the artist should be committed with is this relationship to nature," Costantino told Urgent Matter at the gallery before the opening. The show's centerpiece is *Inverso*, a hanging installation of roots and pipe branches covered in ceramic flowers. Costantino said the title means inverted. The piece is about 5 meters wide, and visitors can walk through it. "What matters to me is that the piece invades the space like a huge monster," she said. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/3c/26/3c26cf7a-2384-4a8d-82e1-f44702177698/content/images/2026/11/IMG_0006-1.jpeg) An installation view of the show's centerpiece, **Inverso*, a hanging installation of roots and pipe branches covered in ceramic flowers. Photo courtesy of L'Space Gallery She said the work feels disturbing, as if "everything has blown up." "You see this upside down, and you are like, 'What happened?'" she said. *Inverso* uses a plant fiber once used to make rope, which she said looks like hair, and silk from damaged antique wedding dresses she buys online. Other works include *Naturaleza Muerta (Dead Nature)*, a 2026 tapestry. Costantino said she photographed a still life with her body replacing the hunted animal, and had the image woven in China in six copies. She then pulled out the threads in the flesh and vegetables, the organic parts she said will degrade. [Add Urgent Matter on Google](https://www.google.com/preferences/source?q=urgentmatter.press&ref=urgentmatter.press) She is also showing a framed photographic diptych of Diana, the goddess of the forest. The gallery said the show includes figures that mix human and animal forms, inspired by Hieronymus Bosch's *The Garden of Earthly Delights*. It tied the exhibition to "Pardes," a continuing Costantino project named with a Hebrew term for an orchard or garden. Costantino said the flowers were made in Argentina and she flew to New York with 10 boxes of them. Each flower was wrapped in a plastic sheet she softened in an oven and molded around the piece until it hardened. She said five broke. Costantino said when she was a young artist, after Argentina's dictatorship ended, artists were "very politicized." She made work about the animals people eat and luxury goods made to look like human skin. "I really hate artists that they stayed their whole life doing the same. I think that is the less artistic thing," she said. Costantino said she was drawn to flower painting from the Low Countries, from a time when tulips and floral arrangements were "so important, so expensive." "Then modern times came and decided that was not committed art. An artist committed to something would never do flowers. I think you have to change that because this is the most poetic image," she said. She said contemporary art, including her own, spent years "fighting against beauty and these technical expertizes." The idea that art must be "ugly and badly executed" is "already over and nonsense," she said. Asked whether Argentine President Javier Milei affects her work, Costantino said, "I hate him so much." "Argentina has very poor cultural politics. We are used to being on our own. But this time the official government is waging a battle against cultural artists of all kinds," she said. In December 2023, Milei's government cut Argentina's ministries to nine with [Decree 8/2023](https://biblioteca.afip.gob.ar/dcp/DEC%5FC%5F000008%5F2023%5F12%5F10?ref=urgentmatter.press), dropping the Ministry of Culture and moving its duties to a new Ministry of Human Capital. A notice in [Argentina's Official Bulletin](https://www.boletinoficial.gob.ar/detalleAviso/primera/319127/1?ref=urgentmatter.press) says a later decree made culture a secretariat of the presidency. Costantino was born in Rosario in 1964, [according to a biography](https://www.argentine-embassy-uk.org/oh2010/eng/a10.htm?ref=urgentmatter.press) published by the Argentine Embassy in London. The embassy lists her pig sculptures as "Chanchobolas," or Hog-Balls, and says she showed at Deitch Projects in SoHo in September 2000, when Jeffrey Deitch had her remake the gallery as a boutique. MoMA's collection includes her *Human Furrier, Nipple Corset*, a 1999 multiple in silicone and fabric. She also cast her entire body to make a double of herself for "Trailer," a 2010 project the embassy says was influenced by her pregnancy. In her photographs, she poses inside art history, including one image combining Botticelli's *The Birth of Venus* with Rembrandt's carcasses. Costantino represented Argentina at the [2013 Venice Biennale](https://www.gba.gob.ar/cultura/museomar/noticias/nicola%5Fcostantino%5Fpresenta%5Freal%5Fabsoluto%5Fgratis%5Fy%5Fdurante%5Ftodo%5Fel%5Fverano?ref=urgentmatter.press) with "Rapsodia Inconclusa," a group of works about Eva Perón. One was an automaton based on the iron frame that she said held a dying Perón upright under a long fur coat for a final ride through the city to greet supporters. Costantino began working in ceramics during the pandemic. "I feel if it wasn't for the pandemic, I wouldn't have opened my eyes," she said. She said the lockdown in Argentina lasted eight months. "We couldn't leave the five blocks around our house. Police were everywhere," she said. Argentina's nationwide lockdown took effect March 20, 2020, under [Decree 297/2020](https://www.boletinoficial.gob.ar/detalleAviso/primera/227042/20200320?ref=urgentmatter.press). "It was like having a grant to go somewhere and you are all focused on your work," she said of the lockdown. Costantino had never made ceramics before and said she spent eight months developing a method of layering colored clays in gradients, like red to yellow or white to green. She then sliced them and assembled the slices into blocks of color. A private teacher she studied with online told her it was a Japanese technique called nerikomi, she said. She said one block yields many pieces. "So I multiply the value, the artistic value," she said. "Very few people use this technique because it's difficult and breaks a lot in the oven. When you fire in the kiln, you lose 30% of the production because the different colors behave differently and break," she said. She said she gives away or throws out broken pieces. Some pieces at the gallery are cracked. Costantino said large murals always split as the clay shrinks. "Why fight against the breaks? What if I take them as part of the work?" she said. "The material itself gets this beauty. I am an instrument," Costantino said. "That's why I don't paint." She said she studied fractal patterns in leaves and flowers, such as Romanesco cauliflower, and starts from real flowers before changing them. "I want to be at some middle point between what is artificial and what is natural," she said. Citing the philosopher Baruch Spinoza, Costantino said "the closest things to God is nature.” “We are below that,” she said. “We don't own nature." Costantino, who has a son, said she is "not optimistic about how we will end." "I understand people that don't want to have children," she said. "Because I wouldn't today." Costantino hosts banquets for 25 to 30 people in her studio, where food is served from ceramic flowers, trees and branches and guests can buy the flowers. One ceramic carnivorous orchid holds a spring roll, she said. "I always like developing gastronomical stuff. At a certain point I say, 'I'm going to do something artistic with this because I like it so much,'" she said. Her studio also holds a 5-meter sculpture based on the Fountain of Life in Bosch's *The Garden of Earthly Delights*. She said 10 people work in her studio, her cooks have been with her for 20 years, and she works 14 hours a day. She also writes, designs and acts in theater and opera, including a piece with 30 live musicians at Buenos Aires' Teatro Colón, she said. Asked whether her flowers feel artificial, Costantino laughed. "There was nothing worse than artificial flowers. Artificial flowers are so ugly," she said. *Urgent Matter is reader-supported. Please* [*consider subscribing*](https://www.urgentmatter.press/mta-first-amendment-museum-of-sex-bus-ads/#/portal) *to support independent arts journalism.*