ART CITIES:Antwerp-Andrea Zittel

Andrea’s Zittel sculptures and installations transform everything necessary for life, such as eating, sleeping, bathing, and socializing, into artful experiments in living. Blurring the lines between life and art the artist occupies a special place in the art world. She’s part of the vanguard of artists who aim to reflect on art’s social role. Her work is a balance between art and architecture.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Middelheim Museum Archive

For her first exhibition in Belgium, Andrea Zittel created a site specific installation for the Middelheim Museum, that will be displayed in the Hortiflora area, while a selection of the artist’s existing work will be exhibited in the Braem Pavilion. In her Power Point presentation “Dynamic Essay about the Panel”, the artist exposed mind-shifting ideas in which she speaks about how we psychologically ascribe entire concepts and meaning to a flat plane depending on its position. She believes that our surrounding realities are made up of panels that exist both as literal and in a psychological field of reality. Horizontal panels, the “Energetic accumulators” as she calls them, naturally function as platforms for actions and behavior, these are the sites where life happens. Vertical panels or “Ideological resonators”, privilege the eye and are the carriers of messages and ideologies. Sometimes, panels traverse both dimensions and become three-dimensional “field” or “plane”, these panels can be rigid or flexible, they can provide shelter or divide rooms, and they can delineate certain areas. In her site-specific installation “Flat Field Works (Middelheim Variant #1 and #2)”, horizontal and vertical panels are made in different materials and colors, together they form units that have both an industrial and a domestic feel. You can enter the units and stay there or simply gaze around. Because Zittel’s interest lays not so much in the architecture or structures themselves, so much as in how they are experienced both physically and psychologically. The works installed in the Braem Pavilion represent a selection of pieces executed over the last several years. Similar to the Flat Field Works, these also explore the format of a rectilinear panel. Hand woven textiles, carpets, steel and sculptural works point to the distinctions that we make between art and design, painting and sculpture, and representation and reality. Andrea Zittel has no quarrel with these categories but prefers to examine the psychological need behind that labelling and the social relevance of things.

Info: The Flat Field Works, Middelheim Museum, Hortiflora and Braem Pavilion, Middelheimlaan 61, Antwerp, Duration: 13/6-27/9/15, Days & Hours: Tue-Sun: June & July: 10:00-21:00, August: 10:00-20:00, September: 10:00-19:00, www.middelheimmuseum.be