Tate and the National Galleries of Scotland have announced that the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation has donated three sculptures by the artist to the ARTIST ROOMS collection, to be shown at Tate Modern from 20 September 2026 as part of a new display marking the centenary of Rauschenberg’s birth.
The three works are part of the Gluts series, made between 1986 and 1987 from salvaged scrap metal and drawn from the visual landscape of Texas in the aftermath of the 1980s oil surplus. Abandoned gas stations, disused machinery and the detritus of a collapsed industrial boom provided the raw material. Rauschenberg described his intentions plainly: “It’s a time of glut. Greed is rampant. I’m just trying to expose it, trying to wake people up.” The specific works entering the ARTIST ROOMS collection are G-I Glut (1986), Rasputin’s Revenge Early Winter Glut (1987) and Mobile Cluster Glut (Neapolitan) (1987).
Robert Rauschenberg Foundation Donates Three Major Sculptures to ARTIST ROOMS
The new Tate Modern display will run until the end of 2027 and bring together more than 25 works spanning Rauschenberg’s career, including paintings, sculptures, prints and his kinetic and light works, drawing on Tate’s own holdings and loans from the Rauschenberg Foundation. Rarely screened film documentation of his performances and collaborations with choreographers Merce Cunningham and Trisha Brown will also feature. Rauschenberg’s relationship with Tate goes back to 1969, when the museum made its first acquisition of his work, a silkscreen painting, and deepened considerably with the major retrospective staged in 2016.
As ARTIST ROOMS works, the three Gluts will not remain in London. The programme, jointly run by Tate and the National Galleries of Scotland since 2008, lends works from the shared collection to venues across the UK at no charge to visitors. In that time it has staged 230 exhibitions at nearly 100 venues, drawing a cumulative audience of more than 62 million people.
Courtney J. Martin, Executive Director of the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, said the gift reflected the artist’s own ethos of collaboration and generosity. “These three Gluts, forged from the remnants of a particular moment, ask us to look squarely at what we value and what we discard,” she said.
Elsewhere in the ARTIST ROOMS programme this year, two simultaneous Diane Arbus displays open this summer at Tate Modern and at National Galleries Scotland: Modern One in Edinburgh. A Helen Chadwick installation donated through the D.Daskalopoulos Collection Gift opens at Oriel y Parc in Pembrokeshire on 11 July before travelling to The Wilson in Cheltenham. A major film work by Isaac Julien, acquired in 2024 with support from Agnes Gund, opens at Perth Museum on 9 October and subsequently travels to Belfast and Bristol. Andy Warhol is currently showing at Wolverhampton Art Gallery until 4 October, Gilbert and George opens at The Atkinson in Southport in November, and Roy Lichtenstein comes to Hay Castle in Hay-on-Wye next year, following the donation of a group of screenprints by the Roy Lichtenstein Foundation in 2025.