Reverberations Robert Rauschenberg featured in group exhibition
The Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) presents Reverberations, a new collection installation highlighting areas of unique strength in the museum’s collection. Featuring works by sixty artists, Reverberations gathers key acquisitions made by the museum throughout its
45-year history, including many selections from the foundational Panza, Schreiber, Weisman, and Parsons Collections, alongside more recent acquisitions. On view through September 29, 2024 at MOCA Grand Avenue, Reverberations is organized by Bennett Simpson, Senior Curator, with Emilia Nicholson-Fajardo, Curatorial Assistant.
“From its earliest years at the start of the 1980s, MOCA’s collection has been shaped by intersections of the historical and the contemporary. Reverberations presents a survey of MOCA’s always-evolving collection, drawing on longtime strengths and foregrounding new commitments,” said Bennett Simpson, Senior Curator at MOCA. “Through juxtaposition, Reverberations creates a dialogue between canonical works of the past and significant experiments
of the present.”
MOCA’s Collection, now numbering close to 8,000 works of art, is internationally renowned for its depth and excellence across media, style, and art history. Reverberations orients galleries around single-artist presentations of work by Robert Rauschenberg and Mark Rothko, and presents large-scale installations, including Rachel Harrison’s Hot Topic #2 (2022) and Renee Green’s
Import-Export Funk Office (1993).
The first gallery gathers the radically experimental work of Rauschenberg. Beginning in the 1950s, the artist produced what he called “Combines”—hybrids of painting and sculpture—and pursued a collage-based aesthetic based in imagery from mass media, literature, art history, and everyday life. Rauschenberg’s work was expansive and textured in voice, idea, and material. It was allusive to a reality that people recognised. And it signaled a departure from the abstraction of the previous generation. Rauschenberg remains a significant influence on contemporary art as it reverberates not only with its own pasts and futures but also with the capacity of the imagination to greet and transform the wider noisy world.
