Katerina Kotsala’s practice explores the complex and often fraught relationship between humans and nature, delving into universal themes of birth, death, and coexistence between human and non-human life. Her work challenges the notion of harmony in nature, highlighting how modern landscapes are consumed rather than truly experienced.
Kotsala’s practice spans oil painting, sculpture, mosaics, land art, glass fusing, and video. Her oil paintings feature abstract brushstrokes with diverse textures, structures, and emotions, often on a large scale, capturing her inner emotional landscapes. In her sculptures, she repurposes dried tree trunks to evoke human forms or transforms replicas of antiquities into non-human beings, stripping away anthropomorphic features.
Her use of natural materials such as pistachio shells, glass, marble, and stone is central to her mosaics where she engages in a meticulous, meditative process that pushes the boundaries of traditional craftsmanship. In her land art installations, Kotsala constructs “earth constellations” on mountaintops, using solar lights to represent Astrowalker, a recurring bird-man persona she created to weave metaphorical and paradoxical narratives. This character, influenced by prehistoric rock art and extensive field research conducted with an international team of archaeologists, appears throughout her work, embodying both figure and idea.
Katerina Kotsala (1982, Thessaloniki) lives and works in Athens, Greece. She holds an MFA from Athens School of Fine Arts and a BFA from the School of Fine Arts of Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. She has been awarded by ARTWORKS in the 1st Stavros Niarchos Foundation Artist Fellowship Program. She represented Greece at the 16th Biennale of Artist Mediterranea ”Errors Allowed” in Italy. Kotsala was part of Documenta 14 team as Coordinator Conservator-Art Handler in Athens. Peter Linde Busk and Katerina Kotsala are the artist duo Busk & Kotsala.