Notes on Practice 

Antonio de Campos’s practice begins in architecture but moves far beyond its conventional boundaries. What might start as structure soon dissolves into atmospheres of light, gesture, and memory. His layered spray-foil works hint at fragments of form but resist the literal. Instead, they evoke spaces that hover between solidity and fragility, as if air itself were caught in motion.

He works with a rare fluency across media. Ink drawings reduced to the essence of movement stand beside mirrored surfaces that fracture perception and multiply the gaze. Prints, metal, foils, and sprays create shifting fields that flash, shimmer, or fade into haze. Some works emerge as objects, others as kinetic forms that hold stillness and motion at once. His rectangular sequences unfold like frames from a film, fragments of a narrative still being written.

Years of living across cultures and a long collaboration with Zaha Hadid shaped his vision of architecture as fluid and open. In his own practice, this sensibility has become more intimate, attentive to breath, to gesture, and to the act of seeing itself.

links:

https://www.faz.net/aktuell/rhein-main/frankfurt/frankfurter-gesichter/der-kuenstler-hinter-architekturstar-zaha-hadid-antonio-de-campos-18653052.html

https://drawingmatter.org/dmj-five-episodes-from-the-history-of-drawing-instruments/?utm_source=Drawing+Matter&utm_campaign=369c874e8e-Sept_COPY_02&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_f4eda8517c-369c874e8e-234575009&mc_cid=369c874e8e&mc_eid=0d69f22eba 

https://www.dwh.de/en/events/kuenstlergespraech-mit-antonio-de-campos

https://www.dwh.de/en/events/antonio-de-campos-konzepte-fuer-zaha-hadid/concepts-for-zaha-hadid 

https://fuga.org.hu/fevent/antonio-de-campos-zaha-hadid-koncepciok/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8mmUQ154CME

https://www.archpaper.com/2022/11/antonio-de-campos-spotlight-career-spent-working-behind-scenes-zaha-hadid/

https://dam-online.de/veranstaltung/antonio-de-campos/

https://www.tatlerasia.com/homes/architecture-design/discover-how-the-work-of-antonio-de-campos-creative-consultant-and-collaborator-to-the-late-architec

Ghost Artists: The Invisible Architects of Art and Architecture

In the history of art and architecture, there exists a figure rarely acknowledged yet profoundly influential: the ghost artist. Neither mere assistant nor silent technician, this presence translates visions into matter, shaping the very language of the work while remaining unseen. Their contributions are folded into the legacy of others, their authorship dissolved into the aura of a singular name.

For over a decade I inhabited this role in close collaboration with Zaha Hadid. Together we developed works that extended her artistic vocabulary beyond its origins in the 1980s and 1990s. I was not simply executing directives. I was sketching, composing, experimenting with new techniques, layering material and process until her language found new possibilities. These pieces—hundreds of them across thirteen years—were part of the exhibitions, catalogues, and markets that carried her name. They did not carry mine.

This is not a complaint, nor an attempt to reclaim what cannot be rewritten. Rather, it is a recognition of the complexity of authorship in contemporary art. The so-called ghost artist is not a shadow but a collaborator, a co-creator whose ingenuity shapes the work in ways that are both essential and invisible.

To acknowledge this presence is not to diminish the genius of Hadid or others like her. It is to admit that art and architecture are rarely solitary acts. They are the result of dialogue, exchange, and layered hands—of voices that remain unheard yet vital. To understand the ghost artist is to glimpse the hidden architecture behind what we call authorship, and to recognize that creativity, like space itself, is always larger than one name.