how did ed ruscha cover an entire room at the MoMA with chocolate?
the installation, on view until january 13, 2024, consists of hundreds of sheets of paper printed with a smooth layer of chocolate.
ed ruscha’s chocolate room comes to MoMa
New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) takes viewers inside the making of American conceptual artist Ed Ruscha’s Chocolate Room. Covered in multiple sheets of paper screen printed with chocolate, the installation is currently on view as part of the most comprehensive retrospective of the artist’s work ever staged. Ruscha first produced the Chocolate Room while in Venice, Italy, in 1970, in the context of the American Pavilion’s exhibition at the 35th Venice Art Biennale. At that time, the interior walls of the room were adorned with 360 silkscreens featuring Nestlé chocolate.
‘During this period, he had been exploring all sorts of unusual substances in his printmaking, and he scoured local supermarkets looking for new materials. He ends up seeing little metal tubes of Nestle chocolate paste that remind him of the metal tubes for his oil paints, and so he decides to use chocolate, screen printing that chocolate onto hundreds of sheets of paper and tiling those sheets across all four walls of a room,’ explains the team at MoMA.
how did this room get covered in chocolate?
In a short video created by MoMA (find more here), the art museum explains how the installation by Ed Ruscha (find more here) came to life. The process begins with the melting of chocolate, which is then poured onto a massive silk screen. The chocolate is carefully spread across the screen and transferred onto sheets of paper. These sheets are left to dry until they are ready to be handled. Once dried, they are skillfully layered on the walls to form the installation.
‘Not many people have actually printed chocolate. It’s different from ink in that it’s sugary, so it’s coarse, and it’s thick. Chocolate melts at a really low temperature and it’s soft, and so that makes it really challenging. We actually do the printing in the space, because if you were to print it somewhere else and send it, it wouldn’t hold up. You can’t even put your hand behind it, because it literally melts the chocolate,’ shares one of the Chocolate Room fabricators, Edan McPherson.
‘As an organic material, chocolate will inevitably change over time. And in past installations, the chocolate has actually bloomed, creating an effect that looks like white dust on the surface,’ adds another fabricator, Ana Torok.
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ED RUSCHA / NOW THEN
Chocolate Room is exhibited as part of ED RUSCHA / NOW THEN, the American artist’s first solo exhibition at the MoMA. The exhibition is on view until January 13, 2024, and features over 200 works from 1958 to the present, including paintings, drawings, prints, photographs, artist’s books, and installations. The show highlights both Ruscha’s most acclaimed works and lesser-known aspects of his practice, offering new perspectives on one of the most influential figures in postwar American art.
project info:
artwork name: Chocolate Room
exhibition name: ED RUSCHA / NOW THEN
artist: Ed Ruscha
location: MoMA The Museum of Modern Art | @themuseumofmodernart
dates: 10 September 2023 – 13 January 2024
