Robert Rauschenberg: Crosstown

When Robert Rauschenberg became the first American artist to win the ›Grand Prize‹ of the Venice Biennale in 1964, 62 years ago, the recognition established his own worldwide reputation. The prize was simultaneously the focus on young contemporary American art.

For half a century, Rauschenberg’s work has challenged convention through extraordinary risk-taking and ingenuity, fundamentally transforming the very notion of painting: The whole of life was open to art.

In his paintings and sculptures appear autobiographical moments, the flotsam of the metropolises, and messages from the sea of fiction and reality, which he contextualizes in densely woven, multilayered works. Rauschenberg uses in his paintings what had never before been seen.

Later he would say: »The materials know that they and I are attempting something together.« Consequently, there is no ennoblement in his works. A dented street sign, a stuffed goat, a chicken, a car tyre, the moon landing, a disused stable door, a piece of music, a worn bedspread were just as useful to him in the making of a painting as canvas, oil paint, turpentine, or the silkscreen process, which he discovered in the summer of 1962 at the same time as Andy Warhol. »I wanted,« Rauschenberg said, »to create a surface that invited a permanent change of viewpoint, a careful, shifting examination of every detail.«

The centrepiece of the exhibition at Galerie Bastian is the large-scale work ›Crosstown‹, 1997, a panorama of an urban city landscape that presents forms and colours in a narrative without hierarchy. ›Crosstown‹ is based on a transfer process that integrates a multitude of photographic motifs into a polylaminate surface using vegetable dyes, combined with painterly elements. Everything in this work is interconnected, and everything dissolves in the moment of revelation. Today, almost thirty years after its creation, ›Crosstown‹ appears as an early allegory of the coming world of endless multitudes of images.