Antonis Pittas

In Untitled (Mirror Object), from 2012, Antonis Pittas brings together two legendary art historical heroes: Blinky Palermo and Kazimir Malevich. Taking Malevich’s famous Black Square painting from 1915 as a point of departure, it combines a graphite square with a black triangle, simultaneously reactivating Palermo’s Mirror Object from 1973 (which was already a reaction on Malevich). However, the form of the drawing was initially and most importantly determined by the shape of one of the cardboard signs used during the Occupy Wall Street manifestations at Zuccotti Park, New York City, in 2011. Pittas first installed his "Untitled (Mirror Object)" in the Hessel Museum and CCS Bard Galleries. When Pittas was installing his show at Bard, the previous show of Blinky Palermo was being dismantled and Pittas decided to place a graphic triangle at the exact same spot in the exact same size where one of Palermo's triangles of his "Mirror Object" was hanging. Pittas creates multi-layered works, in which past and present change each other dynamically and continuously. While, at first glance, the movement of abstraction and recontextualization of the original shapes and utterances seems to obscure the political contexts they are derived from, the reactivation of art history re-politicizes them by referring to the social design ideas of avant-garde predecessors such as the Russian suprematist movement. Pittas’ work could also be seen as an archaeology of the modern.