HERFORD.- In its twentieth year, the Marta Herford is dedicating itself in two acts to the core of its own collection. It begins in the first exhibition, Interior as Idea: Works from the Marta Collection, with early, rarely shown acquisitions that, in keeping with the original idea for founding the museum as a “house of furniture,” reveal artists’ perspectives on the interior and furnishings. Against that backdrop, these multilayered works from contemporary art and design address a wide variety of themes as conceptual statements, as symbolic relics of daily life, as objects of intimate relationships or urgent narratives from the domestic context. This show in the Lippold Gallery thus spans an arc across the subjects of dwelling, furnishing, and housing between homeland, lifestyle, and psychological tension, from a sense of security to traumatic unfathomability.
Under the title Interior as Idea, the exhibition assembles 35 striking, primarily fine art works from the Marta Collection. They reflect the orientation of the museum, which from the start has viewed design and architecture themes from the perspective of contemporary art and operated at the intersections of those disciplines. The Marta Herford, which is located in eastern Westphalia, an important center of the German furniture industry, was originally conceived as a “house of furniture” that would bring together art, business, and community in one spectacular building. The characteristic Frank Gehry Bau with the programmatic name MARTa Herford (M: Museum / Möbel [furniture] / ART / a: architecture / ambience) opened on 7 May 2005 in Herford.
The first of two exhibitions of the collection in the museum’s anniversary year invites you to discover selected works from the collection in the context of diverse ideas of (living) spaces, interiors, and furnishings from various artistic and design perspectives. Questions of the significance of housing, interior design, and furniture are addressed in the Lippold Gallery. Rooms and interiors can serve people as a protected space or home but also express individuality of social status between aesthetics and functionality. Furnishings can also be associated with traumatic memories.
Interior as Idea collects installations, paintings, photographs, films, sculptures, and seating objects by artists as well as designer chairs and objects. It thus both questions and dissolves the fluid line between art and design. Whereas with the designer chairs by Vogt + Weizenegger, Fehling & Peiz, and Martine Moineau the use of materials and (individual) adaptation to users are fundamental to the design, the artistic works focus especially on questioning or thwarting the functional. For example, the table-, chair, and cabinet-like objects of Matthieu Ronsse, Nataly Hocke, and Hannes Van Severen are about function versus dysfunction as well as about the fragile and the narrative in form and material. In addition, Rodney McMillian’s worn-out armchair and San Keller’s chair with an instruction manual focus in turn on statements and stances critical of society or consumerism.
Seating-furniture-like objects by Robert Wilson, François & Friquet Morellet, and the artists’ collective Art & Language can be seen in the context of the oeuvre in question: They refer to a theatrical context (Wilson), grappling with form and geometric elements (Morellet), or are theory become object criticizing art and society (Art & Language).
A spacious installation shows the four-part structure by the Marta Prize–winners (2015) Mutter & Genth, which refers to the technology of the kitchen and furniture industry, bodies, design, and society. The interior space designed with a single metal line by Aykut Erol stands in turn for (design) reduction.
Marco Den Breems’s arrangement with a bed and cult objects, by contrast, seems like an oppressive scenario of a kind of laying in state (or his mother). In Kaari Upson’s film, too, the child’s room in an American prefabricated house (of her friend) also plays with traumatic memories in the stories of two masked figures.
Painted compositions and wall works by Norbert Schwontkowski, Aaron van Erp, Thomas Rentmeister, Thomas Huber, Wilhelm Sasnal, and Anton Henning engage with personal, emotional, and social aspects of the interior—and reveal the cozy, dream-like, and even disturbing. Sociocritical positions on, among other things, the instrumentalization of women are founding in the series of photographs by Sergey Bratkov and in the performance video by Martha Rosler, in which the kitchen is presented as the epitome of domesticity.
Sculptural works by Franz Erhard Walther and Bogomir Ecker are concerned in different ways with materiality, forms, and functions in relation to people and space. The “tableware” objects designed for coffee or tea culture by the designer Werner Bünck and the designer Heike Kastrup stand alongside a fragrance work by Lena Henke that emanates from a pot and spreads sculpturally into the room.
The show Interior as Idea: Works from the Marta Collection invites you to explore the many levels of meaning of space and interior and to rethink the boundaries between art and design. It offers an exciting opportunity to experience the Marta Collection and reflect on the social, cultural, and aesthetic aspects of dwelling and living.
Artists: Art & Language, Sergey Bratkov, Werner Bünck, Takeshi Daimon, Marco Den Breems, Bogomir Ecker, Aykut Erol, Aaron van Erp, Fehling & Peiz, Lena Henke, Anton Henning, Nataly Hocke, Thomas Huber, Heike Kastrup, San Keller, Daniel Kern, Rodney McMillian, Martine Moineau, François and Friquet Morellet, Mutter / Genth, Thomas Rentmeister, Matthieu Ronsse, Martha Rosler, Wilhelm Sasnal, Norbert Schwontkowski, Kaari Upson, Hannes Van Severen, Vogt + Weizenegger, Franz Erhard Walther, Robert Wilson
