Kunsthaus Glarus

Throughout art history, paintings of interiors have always functioned as the expression of individual or societal sensibilities. The environments depicted provide insight into domestic surroundings, workspaces or staterooms rendered in perspective. Furniture, decoration and household items, at times even the inhabitants of the rooms, allow access to an epoch or a social milieu on both sociological but also allegorically encoded levels. The portrayal of interiors began its development in the seventeenth-century in the Netherlands, and became in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries a popular, courtly and bourgeois painting theme. Frequently, the paintings contained allegorical statements. Others are simple representations of daily life and depict the preferences or ideologies of their inhabitants. Still others simply show the appeal of the space and the items contained within. The twentieth century brought forth a new topos of the interior, spaces filled with isolation, constriction and oppression. Only rarely was it still a place of refuge or safety. Instead, psychological states were expressed. The interior – be it the space of the home, work or stateroom – is ultimately also a present-day motif and is the subject of literature, film and visual art. Accordingly, the Glarner Kunstverein also features paintings and sculptures of this genre in its collection, including works by Luca Frei, Erika Sidler or Veronika Spierenburg, who, in their own ways, deal with furniture as sculpture, or the depictions of interior scenes capturing the simple, country life or the artist studio by Victor Tobler, Johann von Tscharner, Mathias Wild, Jakob Wäch, Lill Tschudi, Paul Basilius Barth, Johann Peter Flück, Konrad Grob, Max Gubler, Ernst Morgenthaler, Kurt Mühlbauer, Albert Schnyder and Ruth Stauffer.