21st April - 30th June 2024
Home sweet Home The exhibition illustrates in five themed rooms the everyday activities, experiences and experiences in the home with its bright but also dark sides: The home as a place of privacy, family and security, threat and violence, leisure and idleness as well as work.
The exhibition offers a wide range of opportunities to explore a familiar theme with various content-related aspects and motifs, to discover or rediscover artists of different generations, and to become familiar with a variety of techniques as means of artistic expression.
Privacy: Lovers, women and men grooming themselves, dressing, making themselves up, and posing in front of the mirror are motifs of the private sphere. In their private space, each person can develop and behave freely and unobserved. Examples of works by Edgar Degas, Pierre Bonnard, and the Brücke artists, as well as contemporary artists, depict the home as the place where we move around naked and unashamed and take care of ourselves entirely.
Family Nothing shapes us as deeply as our family; no other social environment has such a lasting influence on our personality and our behavior toward others. It's here that we learn how to interact with one another, how to stand up for one another, and how to care for one another. In the family home, most people experience the love, closeness, affection, and care that they ultimately pass on themselves. Examples of works by Paula Modersohn-Becker, Nathalie Djurberg & Hans Berg, Conrad Felixmüller, and Beate Höing demonstrate facets of security.
Threat : There's hardly any place where we should be as protected as in our own homes. However, examples of works by Max Beckmann, Pablo Picasso, Herlinde Koelbl, Patricia Waller, Eleanor Macnair, and Csaba Nemes demonstrate the opposite. From within, the home can become a place where living conditions are difficult or even impossible due to economic factors or the violence perpetrated. Likewise, external influences can pose a massive threat, forcing us to leave our homes.
Leisure: For a long time, the term "idleness" had negative connotations, as it was seen as the epitome of laziness. Yet, idleness can give rise to groundbreaking ideas, insights, or bursts of creativity. It also accompanies leisure activities such as socializing, exercising, or continuing education. Works by James McNeill Whistler, Paul Kayser, August Macke, Walter Gramatté, and Ulrike Theusner focus on pastimes often enjoyed at home: making music, playing games, reading, being together, or dozing.
Work: Working at home is changing: While it has always structured everyday life in the home—something between a burden and a calming routine—it's now also becoming a part of office work in the home office. For most people, work and private life can be easily separated at home. Artistic creation, on the other hand, is fed by life, which is why, for artists, the boundary between work and living space is fluid, and often inseparable. Corinna Schnitt and Erich Hartmann, Thomas Wrede and Johannes Hüppi, Maurice Denis, Fritz Nölken, and André Villers offer insights into work in the home, at the desk, and in the studio with their works.
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