Robert Storr and Daniel Libeskind on Picasso and Giacometti

Storr has guest-curated a show that unites modern masters with artists of today.

This Fall, the Wexner Center for the Arts at The Ohio State University will host a unique exhibition guest-curated by art historian and Yale School of Art dean Robert Storr that will bring together the works of modern masters including Pablo Picasso and Alberto Giacometti with contemporary artists in order to examine the scope of their influence into the present day.

As part of the museum’s 25th anniversary celebration, the exhibition will feature works taken from the personal collection of Leslie and Abigail Wexner, two of the museum’s major benefactors, that includes some of the most important figures in postwar art from roughly 1944 to 1977. Along with the work of Picasso and Giacometti, the Wexner collection also touts significant pieces by Jean Dubuffet, Willem de Kooning, and Susan Rothenberg.

For the exhibition, Storr, a former senior curator in the department of painting and sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art, has placed the artworks alongside interviews with nine prominent contemporary artists—Joan Semmel, Mary Reid Kelley, Laura Lisbon, Diana Al-Hadid, Michael Mercil, Daniel Libeskind, Kerry James Marshall, Carroll Dunham, and Steven Holl—who were each asked to comment on the impact that the show’s featured artists have had on their own careers.

“One of the ways that contemporary work finds root is by being seen in the context of historical precedence that gives an extra resonance to it,” Storr said.

In addition to the show, the Wexner will also host talks by artists Carroll Dunham and Kerry James Marshall this month as part of its ongoing celebration of the museum’s anniversary.​

Transfigurations: Modern Masters from the Wexner Family Collection is on view now and will run through Dec. 31.


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