© Andrea Zittel, Courtesy Andrea Rosen Gallery, New York, Photo by Jessica Eckert
Thursday January 31, 2012, 5:30 PM | Center for Creative Photography 108
Artist’s Statement: Since the early 1990s, I have used the arena of my day to day life to develop and test prototypes for living structures and situations. By using myself as a guinea pig I often use my own experiences to try to construct an understanding of the world at large. The experiments have at times been extreme – such as wearing a uniform for months on end, exploring limitations of living space, living without measured time. However one of the most important goals of this work is to illuminate how we attribute significance to chosen structures or ways of life, and how arbitrary any choice of structure can be. I do not mean to deny the personal significance of these decisions, instead, I use my work in order to try to comprehend values such as “freedom,” “security,” “authorship,” and “expertise.” I am interested in how qualities, which we feel are totally concrete and rational, are often subjective, arbitrary or invented.
Andrea Zittel received a BFA in painting and sculpture from San Diego State University, and an MFA in sculpture from the Rhode Island School of Design. In the early 1990s she first established her practice in New York. One of her most visible projects was “A-Z East”, a small row house in Brooklyn which she turned into a showroom testing grounds for her prototypes for living. In 2000 she moved to the West Coast, eventually settling in the High Desert region next to Joshua Tree National Park where she founded A-Z West. Zittel has also organized High Desert Test Sites, “a series of experimental art sites” which “provide alternative space for experimental works by both emerging and established artists” and the smockshop, “an artist run enterprise that generates income for artists whose work is either non-commercial, or not yet self sustaining” by selling smocks.
Zittel has had solo exhibitions at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, The Carnegie Museum in Pitsburgh, The Diechtorhallen in Hamburg, The Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, The Museum for Gegenwartskunst in Basel, and The Louisiana Museum in Denmark. Her work has been included in group exhibitions such as the Venice Biennale, Doccumenta X, Skulture project in Munster, and the Whitney Biennial (1995 and 2004). She is represented by Andrea Rosen Gallery in New York, Regen Projects in Los Angeles, Sadie Coles HQ in London, Massimo DeCarlo in Milan and Spruth-Magers in Berlin.
