(New York, NY) – Venus Over Manhattan is pleased to present The Interior. Coming after a year of enclosures in the home, studio, and other interiors, this group show explores the specific state of creativity and productive constraint of the interior, broadly understood. The works featured here articulate various experiences and forms that result from being separated from the outside world, and highlight how artists approach emotional and artistic interiors through various media and modes of expression. Some works were made during a year of lockdown, and others are earlier or more recent works, but all articulate various aspects of the interior and its many possibilities. The exhibition brings together an array of emerging and established artists.

The artistic approaches represented here fall broadly into three approaches of spatial, affective, or formal reflections on interiority. One body of works looks specifically to the interior as a spatial figure, including architectural features and the intimate scenes they frame. Works by artists including Jessie Homer French, Cornelius Annor, Andrew LaMar Hopkins, Melissa Brown, Rachel Marino, Milano Chow, and Ana Benaroya focus on spaces of lived interiority. These artists show how affects and atmospheres can be created by physical structures of privacy, containment, or domesticity.

Other artists use the interior as a starting point to highlight imagination and emotions intensified by conditions of separation and enclosure. Work by Gideon Appah imagines a dream-like landscape for subjects who appear to inhabit a private world. Matt Bollinger probes longing and affective depth in his paintings of mid-western interiors and home environments. Anthony Iacono looks at the double entendres of household objects, and Dan Herschlein shows how intense emotions register inside the body.

The last broad grouping of works looks to the interior on the level of form, color, or other modes of artistic expression. Works by artists including Marley Freeman, Bella Foster, Tunji Adeniyi-Jones, and Gina Beavers represent a qualitative approach to interiority, driven by painterly exploration. Susumu Kamijo and Sophie Larrimore’s works use dogs as domestic protagonists to explore pattern and evocative mark-making. Jordan Nassar’s work carries the show’s reflections on interiority into the register of landscapes, and Chris Oh uses a sculptural approach to activate a physical interior in his painting Curio.

The Interior

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