A WINDOW ALONG THE CENTURIES - The “A window on the world. From Dürer to Mondrian and Beyond” exhibition takes the visitor to the exploration of one of the most intriguing and significant subjects in Western Art: the window. A window defines the landscape that we do observe from our home: it provides the familiar aspect of a painting, with no need for brushes or paints. A boundary between inner and outer worlds, reality and imagination, a screen behind which we observe what is passing by, with the arbitrary role of a gazer. Needless to say that “the window” has been a revolving topic in art, going from the Renaissance to the present day.

THE EXHIBITION - Arranged into 11 thematic chapters, the exhibition opens up at Museo d’ Arte di Lugano, with five chapters, through a path that begins in the Quattrocento to end up with the historical avant-gard. Then the path follows with the Museo Cantonale d’Arte di Lugano with the contemporary art pieces.
Artists from the Renaissance and beyond featured in the exhibition, such as Leon Battista Alberti, Albrecht Dürer, Lorenzo di Credi and Pieter de Hooch, who used windows as a way to organise their landscapes through the masterly application of perspective that measured out space with great precision. For the nineteenth century Romantics, on the other hand, the window represented a kind of a threshold through which human figures are depicted who look out onto an external world that alternately attracts or frightens them. These figures reveal a good deal about how the artists saw their own world and relate to it. Impressionists and post - impressionists see the window as a recurring subject. Painters such as Claude Monet, Pierre Bonnard, Édouard Vuillard, Henri Matisse introduced new kinds of tightness into their compositions as the frontal representation of the window that tended to superimpose different planes.

THE CONTEMPORARY VISION - In the twentieth century windows took on as many different meanings and roles as the artistic innovations that marked the period.
The exhibition looks at one of the most important aspects in the relationship between windows and twentieth century art: the modernist grid. The geometric images of artists such as Josef Albers and Piet Mondrian show how the thematic use of the window could impose an orthogonal order on the way we see reality.
These works adopt as their visual premise observation “from a window”, yet they are so simplified that they reduce into chromatic backgrounds and webs of orthogonal lines.
Surprisingly these same lattice works hearken back to the division of space into grids found in early theoretical writings on perspective.
In contemporary art it appears that the window has exhausted its function as an aperture onto the real world, that it has finally freed itself from literary or religious themes, from the symbolic valences that justified its presence in western art for such a long time. Today the most forceful metaphor for the window is the computer monitor, in the Windows operating system that makes a deliberate allusion to a virtual window and in Google that has reversed the traditional flow of attention, no longer looking outward through a window at the world, but inward as the world comes directly into homes and workplaces.

OUR CONTACTS
A WINDOW OF THE WORLD
From Dürer to Mondrian and Beyond.
Looking through the window of art:
Visions from the Reinassance to today.
Lugano, September 16, 2012 - January 6, 2013
Museo d’Arte
Riva Caccia 5, 6900 Lugano (CH)
Museo Cantonale d’Arte
Via Canova 10, 6900 Lugano (CH)
www.finestrasulmondo.ch