On Happiness
Zoe Zenghelis, Happiness, 2000. oil on canvas, 56 x 91 cm. Private Collection
Zoe Zenghelis: Fields, Fragments, Fictions was open at the Carnegie Museum of Art from March 26 to July 24, 2022.
Contrary to popular belief, Zoe Zenghelis, cofounding partner of the Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA), is no architect. She has never been an architect. During a moderated conversation to mark the opening of Fields, Fragments, Fictions, the retrospective exhibition of her work currently on view at Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh, Zenghelis took the opportunity to correct the record. “I’m getting a bit upset about people confusing me with an architect,” she said. “I am not an architect—I am a painter.”
The confusion is understandable. The greater part of the current show comprises paintings that Zenghelis (born 1937, in Athens) made during her years collaborating with the earliest incarnations of OMA, roughly 1972 to 1985. The firm was officially founded in ’75, but even then it was just a team of four, two couples—one Dutch, Rem Koolhaas and Madelon Vriesendorp, the other Greek, Elia Zenghelis and Zoe Zenghelis—wo…
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