The Raw and the Cooked

This month's Interior Design concerns the relationship between art, architecture, and interiors. Of course, most works of art inhabit interiors, whether domestic or institutional. Paintings hang on walls, and sculpture, as Ad Reinhardt famously quipped, is what you back into while looking at painting. But with some notable exceptions, interiors enclose artworks but are not art, at least not in the sense of the fine as opposed to the decorative. Many contemporary artists, however, have either attempted remaking the room as art or take interior space as their subject.

In this issue, we take on the various implications of art and interiors, from the perspectives of artists, collectors, and designers. Individual connoisseurial visions dominate the residential projects herein, such as the eclectic bazaar of Renee Fotouhi's downtown Manhattan loft or the more sober design that Nick Dine created for an uptown town house. Regarding the institutional display of art, we have highlighted some of the sharpest new gallery designs that have debuted in the last year, ranging from the exquisitely calibrated spaces of Sean Kelly's New York gallery to the deliberately raw interior of The Project in downtown Los Angeles.