Still Life & Windows

A grouping that brings together two of painting's most enduring preoccupations: the arrangement of objects in interior light, and the view outward through glass onto the world beyond. Still life as a distinct genre took shape in the Low Countries during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, though its roots reach back through medieval manuscript borders and Roman wall paintings to the decorated tombs of ancient Egypt. From the outset it carried a double charge, at once a record of the visible world rendered with careful attention and a vehicle for symbolic meaning, whether the vanitas skull, the seasonal flower, or the simple glass of water catching the light from a window.

The window itself occupies a curious position within this tradition. It is neither purely interior nor exterior, neither object nor view, but the threshold between the two. Painters have long understood it as a device for controlling light, framing the outside world as though it were itself a composition, and setting up a dialogue between the tangible things on a sill or table and the more elusive space beyond the pane.

The works gathered here reflect both sides of that dialogue. Bottles catching the warmth of goldenrod, peonies arranged in a grey jug, white flowers suffused with window light, and a rooftop vista seen from within a room all speak to the same sustained interest in how ordinary things hold and transform the light around them.