Over the last 125 years, WUSTL has built one of the nation’s finest university art collections by focusing primarily on the acquisition and display of contemporary work. Beginning next week, WUSTL will showcase that acclaimed collection in its new Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, designed by world-renowned architect Fumihiko Maki.
The Kemper Art Museum will open from 4:30-8 p.m. Wednesday, Oct. 25, with three special exhibitions:
• [Grid<>Matrix], the first installment in the series “Screen Arts and New Media Aesthetics.”
• Models and Prototypes, the inaugural show in the “Focus” series, which explores works from the collection in new interpretive contexts.
• Pure Invention: Tom Friedman, featuring work by the acclaimed sculptor and WUSTL alumnus.
All three remain on view through Dec. 31. Also debuting Oct. 25 is a new installation of the museum’s permanent collection; and Pressing Issues: The Cultural Agency of Prints, the first display in the museum’s Teaching Gallery.
All exhibitions are free and open to the public. Hours are 11 a.m.-6 p.m. Mondays, Wednesdays and Thursdays; 11 a.m.-8 p.m. Fridays; and 11 a.m.-6 p.m. Saturdays and Sundays. The museum is closed Tuesdays.
“The new museum building offers tremendous potential as an active, energetic and stimulating interface between the praxis and interpretation of art and design — the making of art and its critical analysis,” said Sabine Eckmann, the museum’s director and chief curator.
The installation in the Bernoudy Permanent Collection Gallery traces how modern and contemporary artists — in the face of radical social, political, economic and technological changes — have developed new concepts of artistic identity while negotiating the shifting relationship between subject and external world in new and salient ways.
Sections focus on the genres of landscape, portraiture, abstraction and artworks that engage the everyday, with each highlighting a range of artistic strategies and interpretations.
[Grid<>Matrix], located in the Special Exhibitions Gallery, investigates both ruptures and continuities between these two distinct yet related modes of visual organization, exploring how the grid and the matrix have influenced people’s understanding of aesthetics, art and media since the early 20th century.
Drawn from private collections and major museums, [Grid<>Matrix] is curated by Eckmann and Lutz Koepnick, Ph.D., professor of German and of film and media studies, both in Arts & Sciences. It features work by 15 artists from Piet Mondrian and Laszlo Moholy-Nagy to major important contemporary figures such as Albert Oehlen, Julius Popp and Jeffrey Shaw.
Models and Prototypes, also in the Special Exhibitions Gallery, investigates the growing importance of the model as a visual strategy since the early 20th century. As Western art has moved away from straightforward depictions of the natural universe, models and prototypes have evolved from preparatory steps in the creative process to become increasingly autonomous works of art, redefining artistic practice.
Drawn predominantly from the permanent collection, Models and Prototypes is curated by Catharina Manchanda, Ph.D., who joined the Kemper Art Museum last spring. Artists range from Marcel Duchamp and Wassily Kandinsky to Daniel Buren, Isa Genzken, Jenny Holzer and Joseph Kosuth.
Pure Invention: Tom Friedman, in the College of Art Gallery, features more than 30 works by the St. Louis native, who earned a bachelor’s degree in graphic illustration from WUSTL in 1988.
Curated by Michael Byron, associate dean of faculty and professor of painting in the College of Art, it surveys the last decade of Friedman’s career.
Pressing Issues, in the museum’s Teaching Gallery, is curated by Lisa Bulawsky, associate professor of printmaking in the College of Art, and Elizabeth Childs, Ph.D., associate professor of art history & archaeology in Arts & Sciences.
For more information, go online to kemperartmuseum.wustl.edu.