Wannenes - Auditorium, Via Amedei 8, 20123 Milano
MODERN AND CONTEMPORARY ART MODERN AND CONTEMPORARY ART
Wednesday 20 December 2023 hours 17:45 (UTC +01:00)
ROBERT RAUSCHENBERG
ROBERT RAUSCHENBERG
Port Arthur 1925 - Captiva Island 2008
Confrontations, 1969
Tecnica mista e collage su masonite, cm 85,5 x 64 x 0,3
Firmato e datato in basso a destra; firmato, datato, titolato e dedicato sul retro
Provenienza:
Donato nel dicembre del 1986 direttamente dall'artista all'attuale proprietario
Robert Rauschenberg, a Texan artist born in 1925, studied as a young man at Black Mountain College and arrived in New York City in 1949. He initially worked together with his great friend Jasper Johns as a window dresser for Tiffany. Soon the two friends decided to devote themselves exclusively to painting. In the late 1950s they both joined Leo Castelli's gallery. Their new approach to painting is so successful that in 1964 Rauschenberg is awarded with the Grand Prize of the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale. From chaotic Manhattan he chose to buy a house with a studio on Captiva Island, Florida, in 1968. From 1970 it became his permanent residence.
The painting that became an environment, with Rothko and the Abstract Expressionists, was populated in the artworks of Johns and Rauschenberg by the common objects that, unlike Pop Art, in Rauschenberg never have a direct relationship to mass consumption. The painting is conceived horizontally, as if it were a desk full of objects arranged in no logical order or, as Leo Steinberg said, a platform of a printing press. Therefore, a horizontal plane on which information is randomly deposited. The technique of collage and pictorial brushstrokes, allow the meanings of that same information to be subverted. Hence there is a creative relationship that develops horizontally through newspapers, photographs and objects of everyday life.