Inside Out: Art by Stefan Kurten & Essay by Rebecca Solnit

by Stefan Kürten (Painter), Rebecca Solnit

A meditation on the dilemmas and desires for home that combines the writings of art critic and cultural historian Rebecca Solnit with painter Stefan Kurten's lush images of domestic interiors, buildings and landscapes. Solnit reflects on emotional privatization, real-estate fetishism, and aesthetic pleasure, while Kurten's paintings of stale bourgeois interiors and suburban homes project a dogged attempt to make life perfect, at least on the surface. His armchairs, teapots and planter boxes suggest that we are living in a peculiar state of safety and bliss. Together, the text and images question the equation of ideal houses with ideal lives, the images that shape our perception of childhood, and our notion of a fulfilled adulthood.

64 pages, Hardcover

First published October 15, 2006

Reviews

[Juliano · Rating 4 out of 5]

“The execution is difficult. The dreaming is easy and unending.” Accompanied by Stefan Kürten’s vibrant domestic artworks, Solnit’s writing on domesticity, Greek mythology, Virginia Woolf’s wanderings, Martha Stewart’s empire + the significance of furniture is light and pretty but imbued with such intensity and sincerity that it is endlessly compelling to read about tables and mythological marriage beds amidst philosophical and sociological concerns.

[Angela · Rating 4 out of 5]

Solnit is such a treasure. She thinks deep and wide, then boils it into clarity. This book is an essay on home and belonging, materialism, economy...

[Nathalie · Rating 5 out of 5]

‘For admiring houses from the outside is often about imagining entering them, living in them, having a calmer, more harmonious, deeper life. Buildings become theaters and fortresses for private life and inward thought, and buying and decorating is so much easier than living or thinking according to those ideals. Thus the dream of a house can be the eternally postponed preliminary step to taking up the lives we wish we were living.’

I feel equal parts seen and called out on my bullshit.

[Eszter · Rating 4 out of 5]

procured originally for kurten's lovely paintings, the writing itself was a delightful surprise. ponderous and intellectual-scrapbooky, just how i like essays to be.