Ewa Lajer Burcharth Knihy

The book explores the historical connections between the notions of architectural interior, subjective space, human interiority, and represented space including virtual space. In the 18th century the notion of "interiority" understood as a paradigm of human subjectivity came to be articulated in a sustained way in architectural and visual, rather than only literary forms. While the notion of the interior and the processes of "interiorization" were, as Walter Benjamin demonstrated, the defining features of 19th-century bourgeois culture, it is the different forms of conceptual assault on, or deconstruction of interiority that define the approach to space and self in the 20th and 21st centuries. The book examines models of understanding "interiority" as these were developed in relation to notions of space and spatial experience.

Adapted from the lecture she delivered at the Institut für Kunstkritik, Städelschule in Frankfurt am Main, Ewa Lajer-Burcharth's essay explores the dimension of self-reflexivity in the work of eighteenth-century French painter, Jean-Siméon Chardin. Focusing on the material aspects of Chardin's practice, Lajer-Burcharth asks: In what ways were Chardin's painterly procedures "his own," and what were the implications of his possessive and personalized approach to the process of making? The author delves into these questions by examining a crucial moment in the artist's career, when he, for reasons we can only speculate about, temporarily abandoned his still life practice and turned to painting genre scenes. The essay is joined by responses from Daniel Birnbaum and Isabelle Graw, followed by the author's replies. Institut für Kunstkritik Series