Vilhelm Hammershøi: Pictures from Home

This presentation, the first major North American exhibition devoted to Vilhelm Hammershøi’s work in more than a decade, will focus exclusively on the artist's most celebrated paintings—his series of enigmatic, evocative, and meticulously observed views of the interior of his apartment at Strandgade 30 in Copenhagen. Some forty of the approximately sixty-five interiors he produced in that apartment, his residence between 1898 and 1909, will be featured, including several rarely seen works from distinguished private collections.

Opening first at The Art Institute of Chicago, the exhibition will demonstrate how Strandgade 30 functioned simultaneously as Hammershøi’s home, studio, and recurring artistic subject. It examines the hermetic world he created there—a carefully circumscribed environment that became a site of endless formal and perceptual possibilities. Central themes of the show include the artist’s manipulation of spatial ambiguity; his handling of light, shadow, and temporality; the shifting presence of household objects as they migrated between rooms; and the role of his wife, Ida, as the sole figure featured in several compositions. The paintings will be arranged in groupings that highlight Hammershøi’s sustained engagement with repetition, variation, and seriality, encouraging a nuanced understanding of his compositional strategies. The exhibition will thus prompt reconsideration of the notion of home, both at the turn of the twentieth century and today.

At The Frick Collection, the Gilded Age mansion’s domestic interiors offer an intimate setting for Hammershøi’s painted spaces. The Frick’s three paintings by the seventeenth-century Dutch master Johannes Vermeer, on view in the permanent collection galleries, will draw attention to one of Hammershøi’s key inspirations. Hammershøi made several visits to the Netherlands and studied masterworks by Vermeer and his contemporaries. His own quiet interiors—with their restrained palettes, carefully structured spaces, and solitary figures—both recall this Dutch tradition and transform it into something distinctly modern.

Vilhelm Hammershøi: Pictures from Home is curated by Emerson Bowyer, Chief Curator, Kimbell Art Museum, Andrea Morgan, Assistant Curator Special Projects, Painting and Europe, Art Institute of Chicago, and Aaron Wile, John Updike Curator, The Frick Collection. The exhibition is accompanied by a scholarly catalogue featuring new essays by experts in the field, with contributions by architects, artists, composers, and literary figures, among them, Colm Tóibín, Nico Muhly, Marie Hermann, Barozzi Veiga Architects, and Ed Ruscha.