Designed by the Renzo Piano Building Workshop (RPBW) and Kendall/Heaton Associates, the expansion of the Kimbell Art Museum opened on Wednesday, November 27, 2013.
Surrounded by elms and red oaks, Renzo Piano’s 101,130-square-foot colonnaded pavilion stands as an expression of simplicity and lightness—glass, concrete and wood—some 65 yards to the west of Louis I. Kahn’s signature cycloid-vaulted museum of 1972.
Inaugurating the Renzo Piano Pavilion will be an exhibition of masterworks from the Kimbell’s permanent collection. In the south gallery, European art will be featured, including paintings by Michelangelo, Caravaggio, Poussin, Rembrandt and Boucher and sculpture by Donatello, Bernini and Houdon. The north gallery will showcase superb examples of Precolumbian and African art, while the west gallery will highlight master paintings, sculpture and ceramics from the Museum’s collections of Asian art. The European collection will remain on view through mid-January, 2014, before returning to the permanent galleries of the Louis Kahn Building. The west gallery and the north gallery will continue to display important examples of Asian, Precolumbian and African art from the collection.
At the same time, the Kahn Building will showcase the Museum’s permanent collection of 19th- and 20th-century European art, including important paintings and sculpture by David, Delacroix, Turner, Manet, Monet, Cézanne, Picasso and Matisse. In the Kahn Building will also be seen The Age of Picasso and Matisse: Modern Masters from The Art Institute of Chicago, an exhibition offering visitors the rare opportunity to view many of the nation’s most renowned paintings outside their customary setting in Chicago. Kahn’s icon of modernist architecture will itself be in top form, having undergone a thorough restoration over the course of the last year.
More information may be found at www.kimbellart.org.