Robert Rauschenberg — Four Decades at Gemini G.E.L.

Location: Gemini G.E.L., Los Angeles

Date: September 20 – December 19, 2025

Project: Robert Rauschenberg at Gemini G.E.L.: Celebrating Four Decades of Innovation and Collaboration

Why it Matters: Revisits the creative collisions that turned a workshop into one of the most radical printmaking labs of its time

Moving the enormous limestone for Waves (Stoned Moon Series), 1969

Timed to the centennial of Robert Rauschenberg’s birth, Gemini G.E.L. revisits a collaboration that transformed the studio into a site of invention. Featuring more than fifty works created over four decades, the show captures an artist who treated printmaking as an open field for play and exchange.

It all started in 1967, when Rauschenberg arrived in Los Angeles determined to make a life-sized X-ray self-portrait. When that proved impossible, he and Gemini’s founders came up with a fix: six scans stitched into one monumental lithograph, Booster. Over six feet tall and bursting with a sense of radiant invention, the piece became a touchstone of twentieth-century printmaking—a reminder that great art often begins where failure meets persistence.

From there, Rauschenberg kept pushing. The exhibition moves from the weightless optimism of the Stoned Moon series—his lyrical response to the Apollo 11 launch—to the delicate transfers of Hoarfrost, and the witty cardboard constructions of Cardbirds. Each work plays with the boundary between mediums: prints that think like sculptures, sculptures that feel like collages, and images that seem to breathe with motion.

Pages and Fuses, Link, 1974, Handmade paper, pigment, and screenprinted tissue laminated to paper pulp, 25 x 20 in. Edition of 29

Stoned Moon Series, Sky Garden, 1969, 6-color lithograph with screenprint, 89 x 42 in. Edition of 35

More than anything, Four Decades at Gemini G.E.L. is about collaboration. Rauschenberg treated Gemini’s printers, engineers, and craftspeople not as assistants but as partners — collaborators in a process where curiosity and risk shaped the outcome. Together they turned a workshop into a testing ground for ideas, exploring how materials, chemistry, and chance could merge into something alive. Later works like Bones and Unions and Sling-Shots Lit carry that same charge, echoing the spirit that still runs through Gemini nearly sixty years later.

Seen today, the prints feel immediate — less like preserved artifacts than like moments caught mid-conversation. They hold the energy of people figuring things out together, proof that experimentation was never just a method for Rauschenberg, but a way of being in the world.

More info: https://www.geminigel.com/viewing-room/robert-rauschenberg-at-gemini-gel-a-centennial-celebration/