Descending the Staircase

The Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (MCA) announces the exhibition, opening on December 16, 2023 and running through August 25, 2024. Drawn from the MCA Collection, Descending the Staircase considers novel artistic approaches to representing the human body. Using the MCA’s iconic helix staircase as a central axis, the exhibition spreads across the third and fourth floor of the museum, inviting visitors to descend into realms of the uncanny and fantastical. The exhibition explores figures of all kinds, from the fragmented, abject, and surreal to the curated, self-aware, and media-savvy. Descending the Staircase features four sections—Mind, Object, Form, and Action—that each delve into different questions about the human body through the lens of the contemporary art world.

This exhibition brings together new works and old favorites—including mixed media, photographs, sculpture, and an automaton—revealing ongoing conversations among past and present artists. Descending the Staircase also celebrates the MCA’s active participation in these conversations as an institution that has collected and supported groundbreaking work by contemporary artists for nearly sixty years. Artists featured include Marcel Duchamp, Cindy Sherman, Laurie Simmons, Rashid Johnson, and Robert Gober, among others.

This will be the MCA’s first exhibition to feature select works from two recent major gifts: the D.Daskalopoulos Collection Gift (2022), a collection featuring 100 extraordinary works from the D.Daskalopoulos Collection, gifted and jointly held between the MCA and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, and the Marilyn and Larry Fields Gift, a donation of 79 works from Chicago-based collectors Marilyn and Larry Fields (2023) which significantly expands the scope of the MCA’s collection.

Descending the Staircase is curated by Jadine Collingwood, Associate Curator, and Jack Schneider, Assistant Curator.