Informative Rooms

With works by Richard Artschwager, Miriam Backström, Anna & Bernhard Blume, Shannon Bool, Romain Cadilhon, Simone Demandt, Robert Haiss, Roy Lichtenstein, Mark Manders, Carlo Mollino, Claus Richter, Ralph Schulz, Andreas Schulze, Ene-Liis Semper, Matthias Weischer, and Andrea Zittel

Show me your room and I’ll tell you who you are. Do our living interiors provide information about our personality and our character? Are our homes externalized reflections of our souls?

Interiors act as places in which we live, work or represent ourselves. What is in these places also says something about the inhabitants, their view of themselves and the world. So, interior spaces are not just neutral containers, not merely the general framework or setting for life. Rather they are produced by people and at the same time impact those people. Man continually inscribes himself into a space so that the latter becomes charged symbolically and in turn enables conclusions to be drawn about the person who lives there.

Since private interiors were raised to the status of an independent subject in Netherlandish painting in the 17th century, artists have asked about the extent to which the inhabitants are also present in the things they collect in their rooms. The artists in this exhibition understand the interior space as a contemporary expression of an individual mindset and include it in their works as a kind of indirect portrait.

The artists participating in this exhibition use the interior to link collective “memories of home” and insight into the inner life of the artist. Space and subject become unified by composing their self-portrait as an interior or a building. Extensive installations enable us to once again become immersed in the living spaces of our past, while the camera gaze explores the “home sweet home” now and then. Equipping one’s own home, a suitable house, become an existential task or an inspiring puzzle when unknown personalities are (re-)constructed using fictional interiors.

Installed in the former living spaces of Morsbroich Castle, the exhibition also questions the evolution of living since the times when those spaces still used to be inhabited.

The curator of the exhibition is Fritz Emslander.

A catalogue in the form of an interior magazine will be published by StrzeleckiBooks (2 volumes; guide: 88 pages; magazine: 192 pages; with English summaries) and will be presented in the context of an artist’s talk with Claus Richter on March 6, 3pm.