Artists

Robert Rauschenberg, Cy Twombly, Jasper Johns, John Cage, Merce Cunningham

Press release

The exhibition Five Friends: John Cage, Merce Cunningham, Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Cy Twombly tells the story of an influential yet often overlooked network of five prolific, prominent artists. Although all of them have been recognized as individuals, their strong reciprocal influence, artistic friendships, and romantic relationships have been widely overlooked and rarely studied.

Both individually and as a group, they played central roles in postwar art and made decisive contributions to the history of art, music, and dance with their interdisciplinary work. They continue to inspire generations of artists.

With its focus on the interaction between the five artists, the exhibition also reflects on what it meant to be a gay artist in the 1950s, casting new light on the dynamics of postwar art in the United States and beyond.

This is the first time that Cage’s theoretical influence on Rauschenberg and Twombly, the stage sets by Rauschenberg and Johns for the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, and the formal and content-related dialogues between Twombly, Rauschenberg, and Johns are the subject of a major exhibition. The perfomative and collaborative dimension of their practices exemplifies their shared cultural conceptions of a nonhierarchical, multipolar, and anti-imperialist society.

Curators: Yil­maz Dziewior, Achim Hochdör­fer with Arthur Fink