Liliya Art Gallery is delighted to present A Kind of Human Clothing, a group show which brings together seven contemporary artists to explore the subject of interiors through the mediums of painting, watercolour, and woodcuts. As a global and everyday experience, the interior (in particular the domestic space) has been a popular choice of subject matter for artists throughout history. From eighteenth century Dutch genre painting to modern examples such as Tracey Emin’s political piece ‘My Bed’, the interior and the objects within them have been utilised to spark social and political commentary as well as reveal aspects of ourselves and our private lives.
The selected artists embrace and address the complexities of space and show how, with the increase in our society’s appetite for cultural consumption, an interior can become synonymous with social identity. Each artist creates a space within which to delve into. Multidisciplinary artist Sophie Knight focuses on objects used in interiors to create work intended to be experienced as unique psychological spaces. To achieve this, Knight singles out objects found in interiors such as chairs or candlesticks and depicts them in isolation to disrupt the hierarchical economy of value by highlighting the importance of ‘things’ as key social and cultural signifiers.
The title of this exhibition originates from Georg Hegel who called the interior ‘a kind of human clothing’. In this way, Hegel suggests that the interior projects a physical manifestation of our inner selves. One exhibiting artist, Shunshun Qi, through depicting her private moments at home publicly on the canvas, blurs the line between the intimate and the public sphere. London-based painter Emily Mannion creates imagined interior spaces in her canvases to convey mixed feelings of dread, beauty, wonder and loneliness. Mannion uses the concept of the domestic as a metaphor for the psyche.
Artists’ depictions of the interior and the cultural values embedded in these spaces address modern challenges such as isolation and loneliness. In a rapidly changing technological age where increasingly people spend their time in their homes, the interior has taken on new meaning and significance. Through watercolour paintings, Bobbye Fermie uses figures in her interiors to address both sides of these challenges.
Whilst her work initially reveals a scene of domestic simplicity and cosiness, displaying a female figure in situ of a domestic interior, the intense red-pink colour palette paired with soft brushstrokes in her work create a discomforting sense of anxiety and distance from the nameless feminine figure. After the lockdown, people began to revaluate their interiors and the functions they serve. The artists grapple with contemporary notions of what it is to exist in a binary space and how the figures and objects they depict can offer more than at first glance.