SAN FRANCISCO.- The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) announced that on June 18, 2004, the Museum will embark on a new, comprehensive exhibition program, devoting the entire fifth floor to the institution’s significant collection of post-1960 contemporary art while expanding its signature modern art (pre-1960) collection on the second floor.

“The excitement of our new building inspired the institution to acquire extensively and impressively over the past decade,” commented SFMOMA Director Neal Benezra. “Since then we’ve developed one of the nation’s leading collections of modern and contemporary art, including several landmark artworks such as Robert Rauschenberg’s Erased De Kooning Drawing, 1953; Les Valeurs personnelles (Personal Values), 1952, by René Magritte; Louise Bourgeois’s The Nest, 1994; and Splitting: Four Corners, 1974, by Gordon Matta-Clark, among many others. This new program will emphasize the breadth and depth of our collection. The presentation will be updated continually with recent acquisitions and rotating pieces, so there will always be something new for visitors to discover.”

The fifth-floor galleries will highlight works from the past four decades. The galleries will be completely reinstalled once a year—a strategy that accommodates the volume of contemporary works that have been acquired over the past ten years. The inaugural installation will be organized around the overriding concept of the “gap”—or intersection—between art and life, made famous by Robert Rauschenberg in 1961 when he said, “Painting relates to both art and life. Neither can be made. (I try to act in that gap between the two.)” In fact, the first gallery on the fifth floor will be devoted to a monographic presentation of Rauschenberg’s work, a major strength of the SFMOMA collection.

The second floor will showcase SFMOMA’s modern art collection (spanning the first 60 years of the century) beginning with Fauvism and Cubism and concluding with Pop Art and Minimalism—movements that set the stage for today’s landscape of art practices. The galleries will engender a broader, more inclusive and more accurate telling of the history of 20th-century art while also allowing artists such as Joseph Cornell, Ellsworth Kelly and Yves Klein to be presented in depth for the first time. The presentation will also highlight new acquisitions on an ongoing basis and will feature, for the first time, one gallery dedicated solely to works on paper.

With this new program, over 50 percent of the Museum’s exhibition space will be dedicated to its own collection. Following the lead of Picturing Modernity, the ongoing presentation of SFMOMA’s world-class photography collection, and The Art of Design, which features the stellar architecture and design collection, this new exhibition will give the painting and sculpture collection an opportunity to shine.