New on View: Rauschenberg Redux

The Art Museum is currently hosting its second set of loans from the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, giving students, faculty, and visitors the chance to learn more about the work of this groundbreaking artist, one of the most important of the late twentieth century. Established in 2012, the partnership between the Foundation and the Museum temporarily sites works of art by Rauschenberg from the Foundation’s collection in the Museum’s galleries.

The new suite of loans is indicative of Rauschenberg’s interest in experimenting with unconventional media and techniques and in recycling found objects, things otherwise ignored or forgotten. The earliest piece on view is Untitled (Elemental Sculpture), a transitional work created while the artist was still focusing on painting and photography. Originally exhibited in 1953 at the Stable Gallery, it is one of the artist’s first forays into three-dimensional assemblage and serves as a prelude to his more famous Combines. It also exemplifies Rauschenberg’s sensitivity to the physical and sensual possibilities of materials. Ravaged by age and use, the bricks, metal rods, and concrete seen here were scavenged from construction sites around the artist’s Fulton Street studio. Pollen (Jammer) serves as a counterpoint to this worn, obdurate sculpture, celebrating both color and ethereality. Made of silk draped simply from the wall, the work was inspired by Rauschenberg’s visit to India in 1975, during which he explored the history and aesthetics of that country’s textile traditions.

The group of loans also includes two witty, irreverent wall reliefs from Rauschenberg’s Tampa Clay Piece series, created in collaboration with Donald Saff and Graphicstudio at the University of South Florida. These works from the early 1970s utilize fired and screenprinted clay to simulate crushed cardboard boxes. They are trompe l’oeil objects that question the boundaries between fact and fiction and painting and sculpture. Together these loans speak to the character of the world outside the relatively isolated artist’s studio and constitute inquiries into the beauty of the ephemeral and collisions of nature and culture.

Kelly Baum

Haskell Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art

Katherine Kanehann

Class of 2015; Fall 2013 intern, Modern and Contemporary Art