Yesterday’s Here 2001

Curator: "Yesterday's Here," created in 2001 by Mark Kostabi. It’s a screenprint which really exemplifies Kostabi’s blend of modernism and surrealism. The style and the colours lend it a very distinctive pop art vibe. Editor: It hits me like a memory fragment. That clear, bright sky... It's joyful and ominous all at once. And those yellow figures – robotic dancers or maybe the last humans? Curator: Kostabi often uses these faceless figures, these "everyman" characters as some scholars describe them. In this work, they evoke a timeless quality, like figures in a dream or from some future archaeology. They lack individual characteristics, which adds to the symbolic quality, really inviting the viewer to fill them with their own narrative. Editor: Absolutely, and that's what pulls me in. The bright colours initially suggest optimism, but the shadow is inescapable, as if it foreshadows darkness. Do you think the airplane suggests escape, or is it a harbinger of some industrial threat, dwarfing that angular building in the background? Curator: The building could symbolize societal structures, but I am far more intrigued by its position so near those pyramids. It evokes Egyptomania and the symbol of the pyramids that has fascinated people across millennia. The airplane, against those surreal juxtapositions, brings to mind the fleeting nature of the present—what was yesterday is now just memory. Editor: That interplay, I suppose, is a part of the "yesterday" alluded to in the title. But "here?" I feel dislocated! Maybe Kostabi meant this “here” as some ambiguous zone we are about to enter. A stage before the end of days. Curator: The use of geometric forms across the work makes it quite distinct. It echoes early modernist painting—the simplified shapes really bring out a clean, slightly alien quality that emphasizes the placeless nature of the piece. And those clean, crisp colours give it such clarity. It feels unsettling yet approachable, doesn't it? Editor: Exactly. It's that unsettling accessibility that makes this print stay with me. It sparks the kind of discomfort that good art provokes – a reflection on what was, and perhaps more disturbingly, what is to come.