Robert Rauschenberg

The sculptor Robert Rauschenberg bases his work on two fundamental principles of modernism: collage and the ready-made. With these words Armin Zweite introduces two essential concepts which help us to define Rauschenberg’s art as a descendant of the tradition of Dada, Duchamp and Schwitters, in the context of the hegemony of Pop Art in the sixties. In connection with the fifth award of the Julio González Prize, the IVAM is offering the public an exhibition that pays tribute to the work of the prizewinning artist for 2005, Robert Rauschenberg. Twenty-eight works from his Gluts series, produced in 1985, have been selected by Susan Davidson and David White, the curators of the show, to reveal to the public the essence of Rauschenberg’s art: placing commonly used objects into new contexts. The artist created the Gluts series after discovering the harsher, more dispiriting side of Texas, where he had lived as a child. The economic crisis brought about by overproduction of oil, far exceeding the demand, produced devastating effects which Rauschenberg sought to reflect in these works. The crumpled remains of traffic signs, car number plates, petrol price signs and other detritus that Rauschenberg came across in junkyards form these reliefs and sculptures which he himself defined as “souvenirs without nostalgia”. The Gluts series gives the public the opportunity to view everything in terms of its many possibilities of existence – in other words, to debate about the future and look forwards.