‘In My Room: Artists Paint the Interior 1950-Now’ at Fralin Museum of Art

The Fralin Museum of Art at the University of Virginia is hosting an exhibition of works titled “In My Room: Artists Paint the Interior 1950-Now.” The show runs through September 2018. The exhibition explores how artists painted indoor spaces and the various reasons behind it. “A common genre in western painting, landscape painting is understood as a window to the world according to the artist and theorist Leon Battista Alberti and his ideas about the picture plane known as Alberti’s Window,” the museum says. “But, it was after the Industrial Revolution that modern art turned to the interior. Artists started depicting windows into other rooms instead of showing the outside world in their artworks,” it added. The show raises questions about this shift in the mode of representation and tries to address them. “Painting indoor spaces continued throughout the 20th century for a variety of psychological, interpersonal and biographical reasons. The display takes into account various factors such as architecture, design, and still-life and also the persistent theme of the artist’s studio,” the museum writes. This change from the exterior to the interior also evolved over time. According to the museum, “the show also puts forth questions such as whether social and political events on a global scale affect representations of a space, or whether the presentation of space is more indicative of the artist’s mind or state-of-mind.”