Using materials from the modern built environment—plaster, timber, plywood, wallpaper, chipboard, aluminum—Andrea Pichl (born 1964 in Haldensleben, Germany, lives and works in Berlin) creates impressive installations and constructions that bring to the fore architectural details and peculiarities that are often overlooked. Her work engages with and questions utopian ideals associated with Brutalist architecture or prefab housing developments in places such as Berlin, Taskent, Paris, Dublin, and London. Using photographs as a starting point, Pichl analyzes spaces, abstract forms, or banal objects—a chair, a corner, a flowerbox, a balcony—traces left behind or embedded into the layers of concrete and timber found in public plazas, GDR Plattenbau housing complexes, and most recently Berlin's Alexanderplatz.
Drawing on specific architectural elements, Pichl reduces these in scale and reconstructs or reimagines them into something else. By doing so, the Berlin-based artist brings to light social visions associated with design and building, and discloses the tenuous nature of our own surroundings. Pichl's work reflects on the gap between the imagined future and the reality that occurred, revealing a correspondence, a synthesis between people and place where all time merges in the contours of design and material.