AARAU.- The exhibition Interiors. Collected Insights brings together works from the holdings of the Aargau art collection, as well as loans, which all revolve around the pictorial category of the interior and take us on a journey into various inner worlds, that is, into the realm of the private and the intimate. Taking the classic interior as its starting point, the exhibition traces an arc to very loose and highly subjective interpretations of the subject.

Views of interiors constitute a pictorial category within the much broader category of genre painting, which takes as its subject the world of the everyday and the private. It focuses on views of interior spaces, with individual objects, figures or events being ancillary to them. The genre culminated in the 19th century when the bourgeoisie saw its hopes for actual political clout dashed and turned instead to cultivating private and family life on a new scale. Accordingly, classic interiors celebrate the domestic housing and living situations of its residents in detailed depictions. In spite of their ostensible focus on the interior space, interiors invariably hint at an outside world as well, thus allowing the tension between two separate realms to fuel them. As a way to express a particular way of life and a concomitant mindset the interior is appreciated to this day.

Currently, at a time of economic uncertainty, we again observe an increasing tendency to withdraw into the private sphere and a revaluation of the private home as a refuge.

The exhibition Interiors. Collected Insights examines this "introspective" view and, in presenting paintings, drawings and objects from the holdings of the Aargau Art Collection, as well as selected loans, illustrates how the exploration of inner worlds opens up unknown zones, widens spaces and taps extraordinary imagery. The concept of the interior as an enclosed built space is opened up and expanded to include man’s inner life. And since art itself has increasingly become an integral part of the interior, of its furnishings, it, too, moves into focus, eventually causing the exhibition space itself to turn into in an interior.