Wexner Center Hosts Luc Tuymans in Conversation with T.J. Clark in Annual Lambert Family Lecture

Luc Tuymans—whose work is currently featured in a critically acclaimed retrospective at the Wexner Center—will be in converstaion with renowned art historian and author T.J. Clark, one of the most inspiring teachers and avidly read scholars in the field, on Tuesday, November 10 at 7 pm in the Wexner Center’s Film/Video Theater. Galleries will remain open until 9:30 pm to allow patrons to view Tuymans’s work before and after the program. The depth and focus of Clark’s expertise make him an ideal interlocutor for Tuymans, an outspoken and often provocative artist whose works frequently mine political events and cultural traditions and have essentially reinvented history painting for our time. A Conversation with Luc Tuymans and T.J. Clark is part of the annual Lambert Family Lecture Series, and is free to all audiences. It is also the only opportunity at the Wexner Center for the general public to hear directly from Tuymans on his work. To guarantee a seat at the event, RSVP at wexarts.org/rsvp. It will also be streamed live at http://wexarts.org.

Notes Wexner Center Director Sherri Geldin, “Luc Tuymans’s masterful practice of painting is intricately related to his impressive intellectual gifts as a cultural and political thinker, just as Tim Clark’s stunning command of 19th- and 20th–century art history flows from the exquisite luminosity he brings to the subject of painting ‘modern life.’ This unprecedented conversation between them promises to be among the most memorable such experiences our audiences will ever have. It is beyond thrilling to contemplate, and I can’t sufficiently express just what a remarkable opportunity this represents.”

Tuymans is among the most significant and influential painters working today. His canvases currently fill the Wexner Center galleries in the debut presentation of the artist’s first retrospective in the United States, jointly organized by the Wexner Center and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. This exhibition, titled Luc Tuymans and on view at the center through January 3, has received national and international attention, and will also be seen in San Francisco, Dallas, Chicago, and Brussels.

Clark, the author of such landmark studies as The Painting of Modern Life: Paris in the Art of Manet and His Followers and Farewell to an Idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism, is currently the Pardee Chair and Professor of Art History at the University of California, Berkeley. He delivered the inaugural Lambert Lecture in 2004 (in an insightful discussion of a single painting by Willem de Kooning); more recently, he was featured as the distinguished Andrew Mellon Lecturer at the National Gallery of Art.

This program is made possible by generous support from the Lambert Family Lecture Series Endowment, which was established at the Wexner Center for the Arts through the generosity of Bill and Sheila Lambert. The endowment is intended to promote dialogue about global issues in art and contemporary culture, and supports an annual lecture in the contemporary arts by a distinguished speaker. Following T.J. Clark’s inaugural lecture in 2004, speakers have included
Ewa Lajer-Burcharth, Arthur Danto, Greil Marcus, Robert Storr, and filmmaker John Waters in conversation with Vincent Fremont.

Major support for the Wexner Center’s 2009–10 education season is generously provided by Battelle.

All education programs and events also receive support from the Corporate Annual Fund of the Wexner Center Foundation and Wexner Center members, as well as from the Greater Columbus Arts Council, The Columbus Foundation, Nationwide Foundation, and the Ohio Arts Council.