Sandra Peters

In my work as a visual artist, I am concerned with architecture and urban space. My focus is on the reciprocal relationships and influences that exist between people and architecture, and I am committed to exploring possibilities for creating spaces that stimulate reflection on the cultural structures within which we move, and to rendering them experientially accessible in aesthetic terms. During visits to Los Angeles in 2011 and 2012, I became...

In my work as a visual artist, I am concerned with architecture and urban space. My focus is on the reciprocal relationships and influences that exist between people and architecture, and I am committed to exploring possibilities for creating spaces that stimulate reflection on the cultural structures within which we move, and to rendering them experientially accessible in aesthetic terms. During visits to Los Angeles in 2011 and 2012, I became intensively preoccupied with the work of the Austrian-American architect in Rudolph Schindler. During this period, I photographically documented three of his early projects (his own residence, the How House, and the Lovell Beach House), basing my work on historical research carried out in the Schindler Archive at UC Santa Barbara. In addition to slide installations that resemble portraits of the individual houses, I derived a cube structure from the bilateral-diagonal roof configuration of the How House (1925). This sculpture, which bears the title Interface No.1, in turn became the point of departure for a multifaceted confrontation with the form of the cube. A number of different works evolved from this form, among them Pandora’s Box (2016), Tango (2015), and the sound installation SonicCube (2017), to name a few.

In Minimalism and Conceptual Art, the cube attained a certain art-historical prominence – a realization that led me toward an intensive preoccupation with works by artists active during the 1960s. My admiration for such works arises from the fact that they are neither metaphorical or expressive. The materials employed are never symbolically charged – nor are their forms or modes of presentation. This observation, moreover, applies not just to static objects, but to dance and performance pieces as well (i.e. those by Yvonne Rainer, Trisha Brown, and Lucinda Childs). It is a profoundly liberating experience to encounter works whose ideas, materials, or movements are freely available, so that the form of their reception is left entirely up to the beholder. Today, my perspective of the art of the 1960s and 70s allows me to pose new questions – questions (for example regarding my confrontation with the cube) which have never been formulated in exactly this way. My aim is to develop work that visualizes my dialogue with art and with architectural history, and whose aesthetic integrity opens up new perspectives of relevance to our cultural, political, and social reality and to the future as well.