From Romantic Interior Painting to the Home Design of the Future

The large-scale thematic exhibition deals with the fascinating interaction between art and design – interior painting and interior design. It ranges from the visionary pictures of the Romantic era and the modernist designs of the Bauhaus period to the living design of the future.

Works by about 70 renowned artists and designers are represented in the exhibition, including Caspar David Friedrich , Henry van de Velde, Henri Matisse, Marcel Breuer, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Zaha Hadid, Ronan and Erwan Bouroullec, Tobias Rehberger, Thomas Demand, and Andrea Zittel.

The surprising juxtaposition of paintings, sculptures, installations, reconstructions of interiors, historical and contemporary furniture, photographs, videos as well as digital animations demonstrates the topic’s complexity in its multifaceted historical dimension.

Based on around 140 exhibits, “Interior/Exterior” describes for the first time in this detail the history of a convergence between art and design that ultimately resulted in an interpenetration: Designers make use of artistic approaches (Ronan and Erwan Bouroullec, Zaha Hadid) and artists, conversely, have begun producing functional objects and environments (Donald Judd, Tobias Rehberger). “Interior/Exterior” is a further milestone in the Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg’s series of projects entitled “The pursuit of modernism in the twenty-first century.”