MIA FAITHFULL: LIFE IN PLASTIC
Carl Kostyál is pleased to present ‘Life in Plastic’, Mia Faithfull’s second solo exhibition with the gallery.
June 20 – August 30, 2025
“Across the show, Faithfull fuses Renaissance typologies with the aesthetics of digital culture, building a cast of women whose identities oscillate between muse, model, and mass image. These figures exist in an uncanny space between classical repose and contemporary image saturation, reflecting a culture in which desire is no longer intimate but algorithmically shaped, performed, and reproduced.
Each work is the product of a labour-intensive, analogue process: canvases are stretched, primed, and painted by hand over months. Every eyelash, eyebrow hair, and pore are rendered in oil with obsessive precision. Though the surfaces may resemble 3D renders or AI simulations, they are built through traditional techniques that unsettle expectations of medium and authenticity.
Faithfull’s visual lexicon pulls from today’s image economy: TikTok trends, Shein ads, and the ubiquity of “Instagram face”—a homogenised, platform-driven ideal of beauty. Like early modern ‘belle donne’, which embedded visual cues—a red carnation, a string of pearls, a gossamer veil—to signal virtue or seduction, Faithfull’s figures are built from today’s semiotic scaffolding: overlined lips, surgically taut waists, poreless skin glazed in high-shine contour. Yet here, those symbols are both algorithmic and allegorical, flattened through circulation.
In this expanded media environment, Faithfull’s world vibrates with a question at the heart of contemporary visual culture: if femininity is constructed—through silicone, software, or oil paint—where do we locate the “real”? ‘Life in Plastic’ suggests that artificiality and embodiment are not opposites but interwoven. Here, the aim is not to moralise artifice, but to explore it as a condition of femininity today—engineered, encoded, and inherited. The question isn’t what’s real, but how the unreal becomes our shared visual truth.”