Mia Faithfull: Life in Plastic

20 Jun-30 Aug 2025

Overview

Carl Kostyál is pleased to present ‘Life in Plastic’, Mia Faithfull’s @miafaithfullart second solo exhibition with the gallery. Featuring new oil paintings, sculpture, and video works, the exhibition constructs a world of hyper feminine display—part myth, part mirror, part screen.

“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 ‘Cookie Cutter I’ and ‘Cookie Cutter II’, nude figures pose before pale pink bedrooms that appear almost two-dimensional—flattened softness more stock image than domestic interior. Their physiques recall the visual codes of online self-portraiture and camgirl performance: sculpted, inviting, and lit with deliberate intimacy. The skin gleams with an exaggerated luminosity—so smooth, reflective, and poreless it appears laminated, closer to PVC than flesh. A similar bed reappears in the gallery as a sculptural object: a full-scale latex fabrication that echoes, rather than replicates, the painted interior. Referencing the uncanny polish of pop spectacle—from glossy music stages to fantasy set design—the installation invites viewers into the constructed space her figures inhabit.

‘Cowgirl in the Woods’ shows a blonde figure in pink fringe, nodding to both the iconic doll and the media machinery that shapes female visibility. Referencing the 2023 Barbie film’s threat to return the rogue Barbie to her packaging, Faithfull’s figure evokes the doll’s high-gloss allure and the spectacle of the film’s premiere, where women queued to pose inside life-sized replicas. That fantasy of containment carries into ‘Don’t Put Me in a Box’, where a tightly framed figure in hot pink glows under layers of oil and oil ground. Flawless at first glance, she soon reveals small fissures: a missing strap, an ambiguous hand—echoes of AI’s imprecise vision, left visible.

Faithfull’s video work extends these questions into movement. A digital avatar, created through motion capture and facial mapping, rises from the pink bed and performs for a front-facing phone camera. The viewer takes the position of the device itself—locked into a loop of looking and being looked at. The work doesn’t judge this gaze but enacts it.

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.”

– Anitra Lourie @anitra_l

Mia Faithfull had her debut solo show ‘Obedience’ with Carl Kostyál in 2023, after the group exhibition, ‘Through a Glass, Darkly’ at Carl Kostyál in Milan. The artist has participated in group shows, including ‘For Pete’s Sake 2.0’, Carl Kostyál, MARKET ART Fair, Stockholm (2025); ‘London Grads Now.21’, Saatchi Gallery, London (2021-2), ‘RCA Painting Satellite Show,’ London (2021), ‘First Year Show’, and ‘Take! Eat!’, St Marylebone Church, Frieze London (2016). Faithfull has also participated on Carl Kostyál’s Invitational Draw Jam in 2022 and 2023.