Vito Schnabel Gallery is pleased to announce the opening of Fits and Starts on October 29 in New York, an exhibition of new works by Robert Storr. Painted over the last year, Storr’s striking geometric compositions are contemplative and powerful. Storr follows his own intuitive rules when creating each piece, beginning the process by creating a drawing on his iPhone and blocking out areas of color. This digital study serves as the sketch for the final painting, which allows him to experiment with form and color before committing to the canvas.
As Gestalt psychologist Rudolf Arnheim argued, the mind tries to "correct" visual anomalies in the interest of holistic pictorial phenomena. Accordingly, symmetry and asymmetry, balance and imbalance, and the spatial tension they set in motion are central dynamics in Storr’s work. The forms in each picture engage in a quiet but persistent dialogue; a weight on one side of the canvas calls for compensation elsewhere. There is constantly a push and pull, fullness and absence. Mirrored elements appear but are never exact, creating a sense of dissonant harmony. Each piece harbors a precarious feeling, a delicate imbalance with the illusion of symmetry. But as Storr notes, “It is not there to reassure you. It is there to make you wonder.”
Storr draws inspiration from music, dancing, and of course, art. He cites, in particular, a print from Francisco Goya’s La Tauromaquia, a series of 33 etchings from 1815-16 depicting bullfighting in Spain, as a pivotal influence. In Goya’s image, the right half of the work is dense with figures in chaotic motion, capturing the moment that the mayor of Torrejón is impaled by the fearsome bull. The left side remains sparse, marked only by the head of a single onlooker emerging from behind a barrier. The stark spatial contrast in Goya’s composition strongly informed Storr’s use of visual opposition and asymmetry.
Through his work as a painter, curator, art critic, and educator, Storr has had a remarkable influence on the art world. Yet, when painting, Storr prefers not to place his work within the realm of art history. For Storr, his painting practice is more of a respite from the turmoil of the world, than an attempt to place himself within the canon of art. As he notes, “I aim to carve out a space where I can think clearly. It is not a compensation for the chaos—nothing can do that—but it is an alternative. We, humankind, have to correct for imbalances. And so do these pictures.”
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Robert Storr (b. 1949) received his BA at Swarthmore College in 1972 and his MFA in Painting from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1978. He attended Skowhegen School of Painting and Sculpture. His work has been widely exhibited in New York, Boston, Seattle, Chicago, and Paris, and 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 institutions.
Storr was a curator in the Department of Painting and Sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art, New York for twelve years; he was the first American to serve as the Director of Visual Arts of the Venice Biennale in 2007; and he was previously Dean of the Yale School of Art for ten years. Storr has authored major texts on many artists, including Philip Guston, Louise Bourgeois, Gerhard Richter, among others. He is the recipient of five honorary doctorates and awards from organizations including the International Association of Art Critics and the Archives of American Art. In 2000, he was made Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres by the French Ministry of Culture and was later promoted to Officier of the same order.
Storr lives and works in New Haven, Connecticut, and Brooklyn, New York.