ANDREA ZITTEL

If you’ve ever dreamt of retrofitting your tiny apartment with an all-in-one space-saving life-changing furniture solution, you have a friend in Andrea Zittel. Currently based in Joshua Tree, CA, Zittel is an artist who has been blurring the line between fine art and design for over a decade.

Well before prefab and customization became the hot topic of today’s design circles, Zittel was creating compact living structures and all-in-one home furnishings that combine modular parts and mixed used components. Her work investigates notions of individualism, urbanity, and the home, while also bearing an obvious and compelling resonance with many contemporary design trends. It’s no surprise, then, that she has received increased critical acclaim recently.

Just next month, The New Museum of Contemporary Art will host a major mid-career retrospective of her work. Andrea Zittel: Critical Space, opens January 26 and runs through May 27. The exhibition features several projects/products she created under the name A-Z Administrative Services — a combination home-office, laboratory, storefront, and conceptual art venture she founded in the early 90′s as her personal investigation of “designs for living’. In addition to the work that will be shown at the New Museum, her series of compact customized chambers, the A-Z Wagon Stations, will be on view at the Whitney Museum when Andrea Zittel: Small Liberties, goes up February 9 to May 7.

+ Andrea Zittel: Critical Space at the New Museum of Contemporary Art

3 Comments

Patrick September 12, 2006 at 7:27 am

Thanks for posting such wonderful photos of Zittel’s work. I’m excited for the October 6th, opening at the Albright-Knox in Buffalo, N.Y.; it looks like Andrea Zittel will be giving a talk that evening. As for the previous response telling me what I “should” know, I checked out Wexler’s work and enjoyed it, thanks. What Zittel’s work lacks in cynical whimsy she makes up for in inspirational solutions that I have yet to see elsewhere displayed with such ongoing focus by any one contempory artist.
Mark George May 31, 2006 at 2:02 pm

If you like Zittel, and you don’t know Allan Wexler, you should. Wexler has been making similar work since the 70′s. Some of his earlier pieces, such as The Parson’s House (1993), are almost disturbingly similar to Zittel’s Living Units (also 1993). They even both graduated from RISD, Zittel in 1990 with an MFA, Wexler 18 years earlier with a BFA and a B.Arch.

Google Image Allan Wexler.
There are also several good books very much worth their while.

Thanks for everything you guys do!
-Mark
shana January 21, 2006 at 4:47 pm

Thank you very much,your blog offers me great important photographs.