Interior/Exterior, Living in Art

A current – early 2009 - exhibit at the Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg is worth checking out and dovetails nicely with a recent project of ours, though we are not in this exhibit. The title Interior/Exterior, Living in Art – From Romantic Interior Painting to the Home Design of the Future, promises an expansive agenda, yet the exhibit statement, sits well with our own modest attempt to live with art. Here on the right, our very own Marcel Wander’s computer handiwork, literal printed graphics (think Murakami) is juxtaposed with a Kormarin painting, intercalated drips of acrylic that blotch, beautifully, signs and forms we have troubled making out. Two very different approaches to large scale work that seem to disguise figure and ground – not unlike the work of the legendary Cy Twombly, minus his virtuosic brushwork.

But back to the Kunstmuseum, we quote the e-Flux review:
“This exhibition brings together two programmatic strands of the modernism debate as it relates to homes and living: on the one hand it focuses on "the interior as an inner view and a space for artistic reflection" and on the other it presents "home design concepts between the poles of art and design in the 20th and 21st centuries. The interior as an icon of modernism." Well, our interpretation of modernism in this project, is less generic Eames and more Japanesque-modernism from the Raymond School (see earlier blog on Antonin Raymond below), but we do adhere to the agenda of the exhibit: exploring “home design and interior decoration as an expression of our inner feelings and moods… the reflected, analyzed and staged interior as the external dimension of its inhabitants' inner worlds.”

e-Flux continues, “the second strand (of the exhibit) addresses the question of how we wish to (or how we should) live…it presents interior design solutions between the extremes of luxuriously furnished dens and utilitarian, box-like dwellings, and also considers the positive or negative influence our immediate surroundings can have on our lives.

The exhibition features work by the following artists, architects and designers, among others: Caspar David Friedrich, Henry van de Velde, Henri Matisse, Marcel Breuer, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Zaha Hadid, Ronan und Erwan Bouroullec, Tobias Rehberger, Thomas Demand and Andrea Zittel.”

Our weekend cottage project pictured, falls in the realm of the “modest den” and includes works by Aoshima, Epstein, An Me Ly, Bacheler, Halley, against a backdrop of swaying trees.

More on trees (and snowflakes) later – from Eugene Atget to the Starn Brothers – on view in our office.

http://www.kunstmuseum-wolfsburg.de