apartment therapy changing the world, one room at a time

Love the work, love the club-kid vibe of the space, love the gutsy scale and am a big fan of portraits...

but somehow the number of images, edge to edge and in some instances too large for the wall they are on, keeps this from being a great "interior with art" for me.

I'd rather see ONE gargantuan face at a time. And since you've got the space, get your furniture away from the walls!!

i love huge pieces but the work is so close together it doesn't give you time to focus on them individually.

I think it's unfortunate for Tomas that he followed the "2 picture" rule. Those who didn't were able to show the works close up and from a distance. I don't feel you can get a good look at any of the pieces or the rooms. I do think it would be better if they weren't edge to edge, too. What I can see of the art, though, I like.

all of you are right.
it should not hang so close together. in this case i am using my walls as a showcase for when potential buyers or gallerists come in and prefer to see pieces hanging instead of leaning behind each other like in a warehouse setting (and there are dozens who do anyway).
i immeidately will agree with those of you who say that a showcase is not a showcases when it doesn´t showcase. :-)

it is a dilema to which i have no answers. maybe you do: how to show (your own) art if you have too much of it and different people come to see it, whose taste you don't know in advance. advice welcome.

tomas

Tomas quoth: "it should not hang so close together... it is a dilema to which i have no answers"

Let me toss out a couple of ideas, just to see who shoots at 'em:

1. Can you organize the art so that there's a color progression? Say, put the very red J'Adore painting next to the big white one with the red woman, then beyond J'Adore, put something that picks up one of the subsidiary colors in J'Adore? I think my eyes would vibrate less if I weren't seeing saturated almost-contrasting colors next to each other so much.

2. Create a straight line. I'd go with hanging the tops of pictures level. (Then if a picture is smaller, you can put something beneath it.) The consistent straight line is restful to the eye, compensating for the barrage of color and pattern. (I totally stole that from a decorating book, but don't remember which one.)

3. Can you move toward a calmer, more monochromatic background, so that the eye doesn't vibrate between the paintings and a big block of non-art color like the bookshelves? Books are visually busy when they're not sequestered in floor-to-ceiling "built in" shelves. That blue bookshelf is nifty, but it seems to be fighting back.

Awesome ideas, arresting images. Yes, you're trying to cram way too much into way too little and it detracts from everything and adds to nothing. At the very least, can't you paint that mahogany wall white-- and all that brown and blue furniture, too? You're going for the gallery look, and treat your space like a gallery, so why not just go for it and make almost everything white that is not art? In the meantime, I'll say a prayer that you somehow happen upon the type of spaciousness you are obviously craving.

Even though I like the architectural details of the apartment, I might suggest that they are part of the problem. The scale is just so different from your work. What about hanging white curtains, Turquoise-style, in front of some of the busiest walls with your work in front? You could also have some storage for belongings behind the curtains, so the space would be even more like a gallery. There is a tiny apartment in Hong Kong where the owner did this. It came up on a thread here ages ago.

your place must never be boring! always changing. i like that.