Rooms in pictures

Interiors are the most varied and diverse of all pictorial genres. Such paintings record the setting in which man lives, his private milieu, his place of work and the intimacy of his home. They depict every-day life in all its poetic detail, with all its quotidian, sometimes comic and occasionally tragic moments. Apart from the artistic challenge of creating the illusion of an interior with the help of perspective and light, they depict the reality of life in stark authenticity, through an ironic prism, or as a moralistic warning.
The depiction of an interior is able to combine portrait with still-life, the obviously invented with the meticulously recorded, or the legend of a saint with a mundane workshop. Using carefully devised symbolism it may employ the wealth of objects contained in a house to tell complex stories, or may focus on these objects solely to record them in order to delight the viewer with the beauty of their form and colour.

The exhibition features works from the holdings of the Picture Gallery of the
Kunsthistorisches Museum, as well as from other museums in Vienna: the Belvedere, the Albertina, the Liechtenstein Museum, and the Picture Gallery of the Academy of Fine Arts.