Antonis Pittas

Antonis Pittas (1973, Athens, Greece) lives and works in Amsterdam. His practice focuses on contemporary social and political issues and is characterised by a strong sense of history. He primarily creates context-sensitive installations, drawing on architecture and design, art-historical references, and the performative and social dynamics of installation art. Central to his work is the question of how the past relates to the present, and vice versa, moments of destruction, decay and resistance from history serving as active reference points rather than passive background.

Pittas describes himself as more of a viewer than an activist: through research-based practice, he traces how events and social movements repeat themselves across time, exploring themes of security and control, economic crisis, acts of resistance, violence and vandalism. The concept of "recycling history", both contemporising historical events and historicising current ones, functions as a core methodology, creating a transhistorical perspective that maps continuities and ruptures across centuries. The imagery of modernism and the historical avant-garde — Bauhaus, De Stijl, Russian Constructivism — provides an important frame of reference: Pittas examines how the visual characteristics of these movements have acquired new forms and meanings throughout history, and how their utopian ideologies have repeatedly risked collapsing into their opposites, generating destruction, oppression and the affirmation of power. His work opens space for thinking and reflection, on history and on our own contemporary assumptions and positions.

Pittas studied at the Athens School of Fine Arts, the Piet Zwart Institute in Rotterdam, and the Sandberg Institute in Amsterdam. He is an Honorary Fellow of the Faculty of Humanities, University of Amsterdam. Residencies include the Van Doesburg House, Paris; Q21/MuseumsQuartier, Vienna; SLICA, Johannesburg; CCS Bard College, USA; Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven; and the International Studio and Curatorial Program (ISCP), New York (2024–2025).

Solo exhibitions include De Balie, Amsterdam (2023); jaune, geel, Gelb, yellow. Acts of modernism with Antonis Pittas and Theo van Doesburg, EMST, Athens (2022); jaune, geel, Gelb, yellow. Acts of modernism with Antonis Pittas and Theo van Doesburg, Centraal Museum, Utrecht (2021); All Done Go Home, Significant Other, Vienna (2021); Monochrome, Van Doesburg studio-house, Paris (2019); Abstand, Annet Gelink Gallery, Amsterdam (2019); Road to Victory, Hordaland Kunstsenter, Bergen (2016); Antonis Pittas – Hold On, SMBA, Amsterdam (2012); Montage, Annet Gelink Gallery, Amsterdam (2011); RETROACTIVE, Hessel Museum of Art and CCS Bard Galleries, USA (2010); and Untitled (this is a historic opportunity for us), Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven (2009).

Selected group exhibitions include New Horizons, Centraal Museum, Utrecht (2023); Good Citizenship, OSCAM AIR x HvA, Amsterdam (2021); F WE WANT THINGS TO STAY AS THEY ARE, THINGS WILL HAVE TO CHANGE, Manifesta 12, Palermo (2018); I am here!, Macro Museum, Rome (2017); Artist/Knight, Castle of Gaasbeek (2017); No country for young men, Bozar, Brussels (2013); AGORA, 4th Athens Biennale, Athens (2012); and The Shock of Victory, Centre for Contemporary Arts, Glasgow (2015).

Work by Pittas is held in the collections of De Nederlandsche Bank, ABN Amro, Van Abbemuseum Eindhoven, and ING.