Olga Costa

Olga Costa is the author of a work that has been converted into the very image of the Mexican, as it serenely represents the flow of daily life, in which one can see the magic in the common place, the landscape, the flowers, the people, in everything that is the fruit of the generosity of the earth. Neither the composition nor the detail are the best virtues of her work, but rather the sincere expression of what is ours to the eyes of the beholder. All merit aside, because while being deeply Mexican, Olga Kostakowsky was born in Leipzig but became a painter in her own right as a painter of Mexico and Mexicans. She was not totally self-taught; she received some instruction from the Escuela Central de Artes Plásticas and frequented a circle of artists such as Francisco Gutiérrez, Isabel Villaseñor and José Chávez Morado, whom she married in 1935. But hers is in art that is nurtured by intuition, from internal wisdom that deduces the precise color based on emotional security. Perhaps these are not the most objective judgements for art history, but Olga Costa's painting certainly evades explicit categories and it is not even correct to say that she set out to be modern, although she did rejoice in the reality that surrounded her, and in its simplicity she herself avoided calling herself a painter in the strict sense of the word.