Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden presents Over, Under, Next: Experiments in Mixed Media

Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden presents Over, Under, Next: Experiments in Mixed Media 1913–Present,” an exhibition of approximately 100 works drawn largely from the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden’s collection, on view through Sept. 8.

The first in a series of permanent collection-related exhibitions leading up to the museum’s 40th anniversary in 2014, “Over, Under, Next” surveys an era in which the definition and scope of art were continually expanded through the avant-garde’s embrace of “non-art” materials. Artists from virtually every major movement of the past century—from cubism, dada and surrealism through abstract expressionism, pop and post-modernism—participated in the revolution. The exhibition tracks the development of the elements of mixed media, from the wood grain-printed paper of Georges Braque to the beaded Easter baskets of Nick Cave. The roster of unorthodox and incongruous materials includes butterfly wings, glass shards, crumpled automotive metal, jigsaw puzzle pieces, clothing, furniture and colored sand.

Artworks and decorative items incorporating glued paper or found objects predate modernism, but the birth of collage as a medium in which remnants of the everyday are often jarringly juxtaposed with products of the artist’s hand is credited to Braque. In 1912, having worked for several years alongside Pablo Picasso in the development of analytic cubism, Braque began to incorporate swatches of printed paper and oil cloth into his pictures. His “Aria de Bach” (1913), on loan from the National Gallery of Art, was made the year after he created the first “papier collé” (literally, “pasted paper”).

Visit hirshhorn.si.edu for more information.