Robert Rauschenberg: Salvage, 20 Oct 2016 — 14 Jan 2017
Exhibitions

Robert Rauschenberg: Salvage

Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac presents the first solo-exhibition of American artist Robert Rauschenberg at their Marais gallery. The gallery represents the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation since April 2015.

The exhibition will showcase 18 paintings from the “Salvage” series (1983-1985), the artist’s last series on canvas. Consisting of canvases painted and silkscreened with Rauschenberg’s photographs and various autobiographical references, the series was inspired by the Trisha Brown dance collaboration Set and Reset presented in New York in 1983. Rauschenberg mimicked the multiple experiences of the performance, creating a backdrop of layered imagery within a spatial configuration that deliberately encouraged divergent readings. The Salvage series produced immediately after represents a unique and direct correlation between Rauschenberg’s fascination with theatre and his experimental practice. The title of the series itself refers to “salvaged” drop cloths that the artist used when silk-screening costumes for “Set and Reset”.

A fully illustrated catalogue will accompany the exhibition with essays by Hervé Vanel and Mark Ormond. As Hervé Vanel explains: “What the “Salvage” series was attempting to rescue is not reducible merely to fragments of personal memory mingled with clever quotations. The series, to borrow something Rauschenberg said, keeps inviting “a constant change of focus and an examination of detail.” It is essentially as if, whatever the cost, the vocabulary and the visual grammar should never be pinned down in a way that might make them easy to decode.»

Born in 1925 in Port Arthur, Texas, USA, Robert Rauschenberg has been a major influence in the art world. Stepping away from defined models of practice towards new modes that integrated the signs, images, and materials of the everyday world, his quest for innovation was fuelled by his boundless curiosity and enthusiasm for new ways of making. Over the span of six decades, he worked in a wide range of mediums including painting, sculpture, prints, photography, and performance, always questioning the ways the deluge of images in modern media culture could be transmitted and transformed.

The exhibition of the “Salvage” series in Paris comes ahead the first comprehensive retrospective of the artist to be organized since his death in 2008. Robert Rauschenberg will be on view at Tate Modern (30 November 2016 – 2 April 2017), the Museum of Modern Art, New York (21 May 2017 – 4 September 2017) and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (4 November 2017 – 25 March 2018).

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