David Claerbout | in The Bakery: the "confetti" piece

Annet Gelink Gallery proudly presents Abstand, the second solo-show by Antonis Pittas (1973, Athens, lives and works in Amsterdam) with the gallery.

Inside as opposite of outside. You as opposite of me. There is always a distance in contrapositions and it’s where Antonis Pittas’ practice sharply operates. The German word abstand suggests both distance as spacing and distance as withdrawal. In Pittas’ work words are experienced performatively, abstand therefore becomes a territory in which to investigate the underlying tensions in contemporary society.

In the immersive and surreal light emanating from the reflective wall that runs the length of the gallery, the viewers find themselves echoed in the aluminium and bronze sculptures cast from oversized truck wing mirrors. The atmosphere of hyper-modernism indicated in the main space is overturned in the Bakery, where enigmatic photographs create a choreography between abstract and figurative, industrial and human.

As an observer of his time, Pittas’ research converges in a keen sensibility towards news media, an interest in civic architecture and public space, alongside an informed use of art historical references. Elements from diverse media and languages are filtered and translated into minimal hand-crafted objects with concrete presence and tactile magnetism.

In Abstand, aspects from the language of traffic management are extrapolated and displaced, from the outside to the inside. As transitional spaces, roads are overlooked in our daily lives, while through a series of symbols our behaviours are silently decoded and directed, boundaries are created.

Pittas imagines a setting behind the glossy façade which addresses our contemporary societal issues of being both the controlling and the controlled subjects, growing ever more distant from each other. Although strongly consistent with his line of work, Abstand marks a new chapter in Antonis Pittas’ poetics and aesthetics.