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PROPERTY FROM A PRIVATE collector ANDREA ZITTEL (b. 1965) A to Z LIVING UNIT mixed media installa...

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PROPERTY FROM A PRIVATE collector ANDREA ZITTEL (b. 1965) A to Z LIVING UNIT mixed media installa...
PROPERTY FROM
A PRIVATE collector
ANDREA ZITTEL
(b. 1965)
A to Z LIVING UNIT
mixed media installation: wood, steel, chair, electric lights and various person accoutrements
closed: 60 x 40 x 30 in.
(152.4 x 101.6 x 76.2 cm)
open: 60 x 40 x 61 in.
(152.4 x 101.6 x 154.9 cm)
executed in 1993
this work is unique
and is accompanied by
a certificate of authenticity issued by the Andrea Rosen Gallery and signed by the artist
ESTIMATE: $60,000-80,000

EXHIBITED
Andrea Rosen Gallery, New York
EXHIBITED
BASEL, Museum Für Gegenwartskunst and GRAZ, Neue Galerie am Landesmuseum, ANDREA ZITTEL: LIVING UNITS, October 26-March 27, 1997, pp. 20-29 (illustrated)
HAMBURG, Deichtorhallen, PERSONAL PROGRAMS: ANDREA ZITTEL, November 19, 1999-February 27, 2000, pp. 20-21 (illustrated)

LITERATURE
T. Vischer, ANDREA ZITTEL: LIVING UNITS, BASEL, 1996, pp. 20-29 (illustrated)
L. Weintraub, A.C. Danto and T. McEvilley, eds., ART ON THE EDGE aND OVER: SEARCHING FOR ART'S MEANING IN CONTEMPORARY SOCIETY 1970'S-1990'S, NEW YORK, 1996, p. 184 (illustrated)
Z. Felix, PERSONAL PROGRAMS: ANDREA ZITTEL, OSTFILDERN-RUIT, 1999, pp. 20-21 (illustrated)
As part of her ongoing mission to "perfect the organization of a life," Andrea Zittel reconfigures common domestic spaces - a kitchen, workspace, sleeping area, and closets - into beautiful, fastidiously designed, functional objects that she refers to as "living units." "[These works] compositionally adhere to the Modernist idiom: a stripped-down language of elemental geometric shapes in which form is dictated solely by materials, and by ultimate function. [...] Zittel, however, has not only borrowed Modernism's reductive aesthetic, but also adopted its moral dimension; in the spirit of early twentieth-century Russian Constructivism, the Bauhaus academy, and the De Stijl movement, Zittel designs little 'buildings' intended to improveto simplify and thus purify - the lives of the individuals who inhabit them" (M. Grynsztejn, ABOUT PLACE: RECENT ART OF THE AMERICAS, Chicago, 1995, p. 19). Zittel's philosophic aims are reflected in the utilitarian clarity of A To Z LIVING Units, 1993, which transforms the mundane travails of daily life into Zen-like rituals.
Although Zittel's artistic ideology echoes the conceptual principles behind suburban housing developments so prevalent in her home state of California, the portability of her living units is of central importance. "That Zittel's units are small, collapsible and easily transported, positively embraces the rootless and nomadic nature of contemporary life. The living modules, which when folded up look like nothing so much as steamer trunks or cargo crates, answer what their artist perceives as the need for a new kind of endlessly relocatable architecture with its own, internally generated sense of place - an architecture that acknowledges current 'patterns of movement and settlement and work." Her dwelling-forms, defiantly private, sturdily self-reliant, and readily moveable, make a place that at once reflects and resists the larger cultural and social landscape of broken ties and relationships"
(M. Grynsztejn, ibid., p. 20).