It’s interesting how one’s story can change, deepen and strengthen over time.
As an artist and designer, Bas Kosters is driven by commitment and compassion. He creates worlds inhabited by radiant, alarming and endearing figures that reflect his social engagement. No matter the discipline, Bas works vigorously and with enthusiasm, but he is especially fond of textile and graphic art, which he uses to express and celebrate personal and societal themes. He approaches difficult emotions in a light-footed way, with subtle and sometimes wry humor and his trademark texts. Bas’ fascination for cartoon characters, visualizations and erotica leads to a reality full of friction, full of different views that compete for your attention. Welcome to the world of Bas Kosters.
Even though Bas Kosters merely orbits the fashion industry like the alluring alien that he is, he fully embraces fashion’s innate accessibility, which allows him to ease into people’s hearts and minds and work his magic right there. Not that he wants to dictate anything.
The unique performative quality of fashion is that it allows people to express themselves. This is exactly what the multifaceted artist Bas Kosters is all about. His work is inextricably linked to who he is; it is his ‘flow’. There is no plan, no marketing, no ego; just his natural born enthusiasm and genuine engagement with the world as is.
Bas Kosters’s 2016 solo exhibition ‘I want it to be soft’ in Museum Arnhem paid tribute to the adroit creative centipede he really is. Iconic is an overused term, but it certainly applies to Bas’s work, which includes actual fashion as well as costume design, graphics and illustration, installations and performance art, punkish publishing and engaged protests, commercial creative collaborations and everything that the artist wishes to file under his cherished fluid autonomy.