Robert Rauschenberg

The thing that’s been a constant over all these years is that I believe that art is communication so that the message has to change with time… If I can possibly show to anyone that the world belongs to them, to each person, then the work is successful. And if I succeed in being a great artist, then there won’t be any need for artists any more.
—Robert Rauschenberg

Gagosian Gallery is pleased to present a major exhibition of painting and sculpture by Robert Rauschenberg.

Rauschenberg stands as one of the most inventive artists in American art, arguably the first of his generation to chart a viable course out of Abstract Expressionism towards the formal integration of art and the mess of life. His approach to making art using discarded materials, everyday objects and appropriated images eviscerated the distinctions between medium and genre, abstraction and representation, while his “flatbed picture plane” forever changed the relationship between artist, image, and viewer. This exhibition highlights the breadth and range of Rauschenberg’s untrammeled and transformative vision and his enduring influence on subsequent generations of artists working today.

From the outset, the incidental, the immediate, and the perception of a presence greater than his own artistic virtuosity drove Rauschenberg’s creative energies. By working in what he called “the gap between art and life” he developed an altogether new visual language based on collage as a microcosm of the unbounded world that rejected the conventions of unitary meaning advanced by high art. Walking the streets of New York, he picked up trash and discarded objects that caught his interest and integrated them into compositions that he called, simply and paradigmatically, “combines”. In the Combines from the 1950s and early 1960s, all manner of urban debris, clothing, taxidermy animals, and art reproductions merge to signify perpetually shifting perspectives and meanings, from Greenhouse (1950) which incorporates such humble materials such as dirt, twigs, wire and broken glass; to Short Circuit (1955), in which a Jasper Johns’ Flag and a painting by his wife Susan Weil meld into a larger collage whose support is a rustic hinged wooden cabinet; to Dylaby (1962), that was part of his contribution to the “dynamic labyrinth” exhibition by the New Realists at the Stedelijk Museum in 1962.