Zittel, Andrea

* 6.9.1965 Escondido/California

Andrea Zittel is an American sculptor and installation artist. She received her Bachelor of Fine Arts in Painting and Sculpture from San Diego State University in 1988 and completed her Masters in Sculpture at the Rhode Island School of Design in 1990. In 1995 she joined the DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Programme.

Zittel’s works, consisting of sculptures and installations, are composed of furnishings and items of clothing, which are transformed into a habitable, artificial world in which the boundaries between art and life are blurred and which create their own social environment.

Inspired by modern design and architecture and the work of Bauhaus artists such as Anni and Josef Albers, the Austrian architect Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky, the American Richard Buckminster Fuller and the furniture designers Charles and Ray Eames, she takes these handmade objects and installations and, with playful humour, creates ‘Living Units’ as autonomous biotopes.

In 1994, she moved into a three-storey building in Brooklyn, New York, which she called ‘A-Z East’ and which served as her workshop and project space for six years of experimental research. Here she explored the eating, sleeping, dressing and washing habits of the temporary residents. In 1999, she moved with her ‘A-Z West’ project to a 10-hectare site in the Californian Mojave Desert near Joshua Tree, where she further developed her "Experiments in Living".