Robert Storr: Proposals

2022

After an epic career of art criticism and curation including over a decade as senior curator in Painting and Sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art and the first American curator of the Venice Biennale in 2007, Storr has returned to where it all began for him: painting. In Storr’s own words:

Literature and discourse say things. Art makes them visible. In some instances, be they inherently material or immaterial, it even makes them palpable. The artist is free to choose the subject matter and the means s/he concentrates on. Nothing that a committed artist selects is out of bounds, be it in terms of imagery or medium, be it in terms of existing conventions or previously uncodified or unexplored ones. Art history is always starting over. That process is often jump-started by hitherto undervalued intuitions about and direct connections to the past. In and of itself no way of making holds the key to the future, and none is universally obsolete or forever anachronistic. Artists can be opportunists, and they are to be commended for it when they succeed in sharing that opportunity with others who have too casually bypassed or too ardently disparaged it, all the while reminding the general public that possibilities are always open if you can find a way to breath life into them. There is no end of painting – nor of any set of options related to it. There is just painting. Fast and furious or slow and steady, and not infrequently both in alternating currents. These panels - or Proposals for paintings - were realized in fits and starts during the arduous course of the past six years. They have been my fragile barrier reef against the tsunami of negativity we’ve all endured.

Robert Storr (b. 1949) is a painter, educator, critic, and curator. He earned his BA at Swarthmore College in 1972 and in 1978 his MFA in painting from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He has attended Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. His work has been widely exhibited in New York, Boston, Seattle, Chicago, and Paris. His work is in the collections of the Nelson Atkins Museum, Kansas City, the Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, The Mead Art Museum, Amherst College, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and many other comparable institutions. He has taught extensively at schools ranging from Yale University, where he served for a decade as Dean of the School of Art as well as Professor of Painting & Printmaking, to the Carpenter Center at Harvard, The Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, Bard College, The Rhode Island School of Art and Design, and the Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture. He splits his time between New Haven and Brooklyn.

1. First Proposal

Oil on canvas over board

20 in x 24 in

2020