Windows

About

The Artist Room is delighted to present its inaugural exhibition, Windows, exploring the subject of the window in postwar and contemporary art. Owing to the Covid-19 pandemic, the window has found its way to the centre of the collective consciousness as lockdowns have kept us in our homes for months on end. Not previously afforded much thought or attention, since the pandemic the window has come to command a presence within our lives, even taking on a life of its own. Acting as both a portal to and barrier between inside and out, windows seem to exist in a strange, liminal non-space, one defined by their own duality and contradiction. They have offered the hopeful promise of a world outside the confines of domesticity, yet heightened our frustrations as they kept us in. 

Instead of merely looking through the window, we wish to look at them, questioning how artists, as those who frame our reality, have engaged with the subject. What are the themes and ideas that emerge out of such an interrogation? What happens when their non-space is realised through visual means? Featuring works by Nicole Coson, William Eggleston, Poppy Jones, Daido Moriyama, Ed Ruscha, Prem Sahib, Donavon Smallwood, Wolfgang Tillmans and Cy Twombly, Windows seeks to explore all of this and more, bringing into conversation a diverse group of artists who are united by a shared interest in this multivalent motif.