NEW YORK.-From January 26 – May 27, 2006, the New Museum of Contemporary Art will present Andrea Zittel: Critical Space, a mid-career survey of one of today’s most influential American artists. Critical Space brings together a large selection of Zittel’s habitats, installations, drawings and documentation in an effort to illuminate the comprehensive manner in which the artist addresses the challenges of living and working within the prescribed spaces of our contemporary world. Andrea Zittel: Critical Space is co-organized by the New Museum of Contemporary Art and the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston. The exhibition is co-curated by Trevor Smith, Curator at the New Museum, and Paola Morsiani, Curator at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston.

Zittel has taken a systematic approach to integrating her life and work, and has made calculated efforts to make visible the connection between the two. She creates meaning through functional objects, and then takes it one step further by marketing and branding her lifestyle and beliefs under the name A-Z Administrative Services, engaging her audience sincerely and directly. Her rich body of work -- which takes on the fundamentals of food, clothing, shelter and the contemporary landscape -- is influenced by such diverse sources as Jenny Holzer, Dan Graham, Constructivism and the Bauhaus Movement. Her work has in turn set an example for a younger generation of artists to make up their own rules and use their own lives as the basis for the production of artwork.

Zittel researches, designs and constructs her own domestic settings and objects as test cases through which she explores the fulfillment of such basic human needs as security, self-empowerment, intimacy and comfort. Over 75 of these objects, created between 1991 and 2005, will be on view at the New Museum.

Zittel’s A-Z Personal Uniforms (1991-2005) exemplify the artist’s desire to create functional, utilitarian garments for herself without sacrificing her individualism. Each piece of clothing in the series was handmade by the artist to function as a uniform that she would wear daily for a period of weeks or even months. First and foremost, these uniforms were "work garments", designed to keep the artist comfortable during specific seasons and while she was working on specific projects. But the craftsmanship and beauty of these uniforms also demonstrate the artist’s consciousness of dressing and fashion in the public sphere – an acknowledgement of the human relationship to clothing and appearance. As in all her work, these uniforms are an attempt to pare something down to the essentials, without stripping away identity and with a nod to the reality of a consumerist world. Her uniform commissions show how Zittel’s devotion to process and exploration of the individual extend to a larger community.

In 1992, Zittel developed her first A-Z Management and Maintenance Unit, a three-dimensional grid that coordinated her living functions and maximized her small studio space, and A-Z Carpet Furniture, wall-to-floor coverings woven with patterns representing schematic aerial views of a furnished room, her first attempts to address the basic needs of habitation. These inhabitable sculptures represent the artist’s desire to organize space and life functions within a controlled area. Other objects that demonstrate this effort include A-Z Body Processing Unit (1993), designed to hygienically integrate kitchen and bathroom systems; and A-Z Food Group (1993), dehydrated food consisting of twelve essential ingredients that can be eaten dry or cooked. These and her A-Z Living Units from 1993 and 1994 continuously represent the artist’s attempts to streamline life and modify behavior while retaining a sense of freedom and identity.

Zittel’s process of questioning reality and formulating answers extends into the scientific realm as well. Her Breeding Works from the early 1990s adopt the animal as a ready-made work and look to breeding as an analogue to issues of human hierarchy and aesthetic choice. These works also investigate the social impulses that lead to the creation of hierarchy, and ultimately explore the human desire for control, especially in relation to the adoption of animals as pets and the process of cloning. Zittel’s A-Z Breeding Unit for Reassigning Flight (1993), for example, first installed in the window of the New Museum at 583 Broadway, was an experiment designed to evolve flight back into breeder chickens.

In the late 1990s, Zittel turned her focus to the urban sprawl, and what she felt was the isolation of individuals within their own personal spaces. Her line of A-Z Raugh Furniture, begun in 1998, demonstrates a break from her streamlined spaces and is instead intended to complement the natural human inclination towards disorder – its resemblance to faux rock landscapes meant to conceal dirt and work as multi-purpose objects. Her A-Z Homestead Units (2001-2005) are stand-alone structures that are small enough to be portable and not require a building permit, allowing owners to "Go West!" in a manner reminiscent of the early American frontier, escaping the confines of the suburban home.

Zittel has made clear that she is constantly searching to find the equilibrium between freedom and security, without feeling a sense of overwhelming vastness or confinement. In 1996, she came up with the concept of the A-Z Escape Vehicle, a scaled-down version of a mobile home designed to accommodate only one or two people comfortably. Customized for both herself and a number of collectors, each Escape Vehicle serves as a place of refuge from public interaction, an escape from the constraints of everyday social conventions into a space designed to the specifications of an individual’s vision of paradise. With her floating A-Z Deserted Islands (1997), Zittel fulfills the fantasy of isolation and escape but within a predictable environment.