Image: Catherine Wagner (American, b. 1953), -86 Degree Freezer (Colon Cancer), 1995. Gelatin silver print. University purchase, Charles H. Yalem Art Fund, 1996. | Dario Robleto (American, b. 1972), Smelling Lavender, 1896, 2018. Photolithograph with transparent base ink on hand-flamed and sooted Rising Drawing Bristol paper. Gift of Island Press, 2024. Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, St. Louis
The Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum in St. Louis has opened ‘Art and Science: Dario Robleto and Catherine Wagner,’ an ongoing collection installation examining the relationship between artistic and scientific investigation. The presentation began on August 15, 2026, in the museum’s Photography Gallery.
The installation brings together selections from two bodies of work in the museum’s permanent collection: Dario Robleto’s print portfolio ‘The First Time, the Heart: A Portrait of Life 1854–1913’ (2018) and Catherine Wagner’s photographic series ‘-86 Degree Freezers’ (1995). Their juxtaposition focuses on shared habits of inquiry rather than treating art and science as separate fields.
According to the museum’s presentation, artists throughout history have engaged with scientific research and its results in multiple ways, including by assuming the role of the scientist or by taking scientific discoveries as subjects. The installation uses that history as a framework for considering how questioning and experimentation operate across both disciplines.
Robleto’s portfolio is represented by selections from a body of prints that draws on the visual and conceptual language of historical scientific investigation. The museum dates the portfolio to 2018 and identifies the sheet it illustrates, ‘Smelling Lavender, 1896’, as a photolithograph with transparent base ink on hand-flamed and sooted Rising Drawing Bristol paper. The work entered the collection as a gift of Island Press in 2024.
Wagner’s series approaches scientific environments through photography. The museum dates ‘-86 Degree Freezers’ to 1995 and lists ‘-86 Degree Freezer (Colon Cancer)’ as a gelatin silver print acquired through a university purchase supported by the Charles H. Yalem Art Fund in 1996.
Together, the works address the processes by which knowledge is produced, recorded and represented. The museum describes the presentation as revealing the parallel nature of the questioning and experimenting that propel artistic and scientific investigation, with the pairing intended to stimulate discussion and ideas about human existence.
The Kemper Art Museum is part of the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts at Washington University in St. Louis. ‘Art and Science: Dario Robleto and Catherine Wagner’ remains on view in the Photography Gallery from August 15, 2026, with no closing date announced.
