Kunstmuseum Schloss Derneburg is pleased to announce a group exhibition, The Inside Out. This cross-generational survey investigates privacy and intimacy through various lenses, including the domestic, the body, counterculture, family, community, and identity. Installed throughout the formerly domestic setting of the building’s west wing, the show includes approximately fifty works by more than thirty artists from the 1950s to today, most of which have never been exhibited at Kunstmuseum Schloss Derneburg before.

The 18^th Century German concept of Innerlichkeit (inwardness) characterized an intentional distancing from the external world. The French intimists of the 19^th century, including Pierre Bonnard, similarly emphasized the everyday and the banal, enriched by decorative and embellished surroundings. The resulting subjects are often imbued with a sense of autonomy that suggests the viewer is an intruder from the outside, at times welcome or interrupting. Meanwhile, artists have considered the physical manifestation of internal conditions as well as performative ideals about the body, in which taboos are normalized when the personal is forced into the open. The Inside Out explores these ideas through various subjects, as well as through composition and technique, raising interesting questions about our occupation of space, and how we define internal and external environments with one another and with ourselves.

Danica Lundy’s monumental painting Chamber (2022) is a deeply personal homage to the artist’s father and his long career as a photographer. On close inspection the compositional base is a tool of allegory, following the technical layout of a Nikon film camera (her father’s preferred model). Lundy’s work often explores autobiographical experience as interior and exterior, relying heavily on illusion and compositional structure to fill the margins of a canvas with as much narrative as possible.

The painting 57 East 66^th Street, New York Home of Andy Warhol (2018) by Enoc Perez is based on a photograph of the American Pop artist’s bathroom cabinet taken by David Gamble. Perez’s painting honors and distorts the impeccable details of the photograph, which displays various prescription drugs, ointments and hygienic products in a mirrored cabinet with glass shelves. The painting is a unique and visually alluring portrait of Warhol himself, whose protection over his private life concealed his obsessions with beauty and hoarding.

The American photographer and filmmaker Nan Goldin is celebrated for her intimate and bohemian portraiture that features lovers, friends and strangers who often populate city night life. In one of her most famous photographs, Nan and Brian in Bed, New York City (1983), Goldin portrays herself and her boyfriend in a postcoital moment. The lack of direct gaze from either subject perhaps suggests that the viewer is intruding on a private moment.

In Night Sky Loft (1973) by Lois Dodd, an arrangement of objects allows a complicated view of interior and exterior space, aligning the view out of a window with a reverse view in the reflection of a mirror. In the evening painting, Dodd interprets the backlit apartments outside her studio in individual squares of white, yellow and blue, the window acting as a reminder of the distance between the interior and the exterior world.

The Inside Out  includes works by Georg Baselitz, Cecily Brown, Cristina Canale, Andrew Cranston, Lois Dodd, Nicole Eisenman, Tracey Emin, Natalie Frank, Ralph Gibson, Roger-Edgar Gillet, Nan Goldin, Philip Guston, Mary Heilmann, Jocelyn Hobbie, Horst P. Horst, Jörg Immendorff, Chantal Joffe,  Danica Lundy, Marcin Maciejowski, Helmut Newton, A.R. Penck, Enoc Perez, Emily Pettigrew, Nathaniel Mary Quinn, Larry Rivers, Susan Rothenberg, Norbert Schwontkowski, Joan Semmel, Jeanloup Sieff, Christoph Steinmeyer, Sophie von Hellermann, and Brett Weston.

For more information and images, please contact the Hall Art Foundation’s administrative office at info@hallartfoundation.org.

We offer free public guided tours and special guided tours for selected exhibitions.