Latest Ocula Conversation Artist Taloi Havini and Ruth McDougall, curator of Pacific art at Queensland Art Gallery and Gallery of Modern Art, discuss Havini's first Australian solo exhibition, Reclamation .
Ocula Report Sydney Biennale Connects Here with Everywhere By Soo-Min Shim, Sydney 'This year's Biennale of Sydney seems like a corrective,' writes Soo-Min Shim, 'prioritising autonomy in an international exhibition format that has all too often omitted or sidelined First Nations artists.'
Ocula Insight Hell is a Place on Earth: P·P·O·W Looks to History in Context of Covid-19 By Stephanie Bailey, London In the United States, parallels have been drawn between the HIV/AIDS crisis and what is unfolding with Covid-19. These connections feed into P·P·O·W's online exhibition, Hell is a Place on Earth. Heaven is a Place in Your Head .
Robert Rauschenberg was an American avantgarde painter who—due to his extraordinarily catholic research interests in the late 1950, the 1960s, and the early 1970s—pioneered technical and expressive innovations, not only in the ideational potential of painting and assemblage, but also in sculpture, installation, printmaking, drawing, ceramics, papermaking, dance, and performance. As a highly prolific, multi-disciplinary artist, he was an energetic boundary-blurrer, and a great traveller and international collaborator.
Read MoreRobert Rauschenberg was born in Port Arthur, Texas. After studying painting in Kansas City, Paris, and North Carolina, he moved to New York in 1950—when Abstract Expressionism was in full swing but Pop art, with its celebration of everyday imagery, was soon to emerge.
Robert Rauschenberg's interest in photography, screenprinting, and other disciplines led him to further develop ideas, stimulated by Marcel Duchamp and Kurt Schwitters, of store-purchased ready-mades, found objects, and printed media mingled with a strong sense of the materiality of paint and the spatial independence of sculpture—be that freestanding or wall relief. These works were often called 'combines'.
The idea that an artwork might be a kind of decipherable rebus was encouraged by Robert Rauschenberg's close friendship with Jasper Johns, both artists being interested in the implications of carefully chosen attached objects, thickly applied paint, and abstraction blended with narrative elements. Their works are now seen as precursors to Pop art.
Through innovative Dada-inspired works like Bed (1955), with its vertically presented paint-encrusted bed and quilt, or Monogram (1959), with its stuffed billy goat standing on a platform and thrust through an automobile tyre, Robert Rauschenberg became an important influence on later artists such as Jessica Stockholder, Isa Genzken, Don Driver, and Rachel Harrison. He was also a precursor of the 1970s conceptual art movement with works like Erased de Kooning Drawing (1953) and This is a Portrait of Iris Clert If I Say So, the latter of which is a telegram he sent his dealer (named in the title) in 1961.
There have been many surveys of Robert Rauschenberg's varied and innovative practice. The most significant recent ones have been Robert Rauschenberg, Tate Modern, London (2016); and Robert Rauschenberg: Among Friends, The Museum of Modern Art, New York (2017).
Biography by John Hurrell | Ocula | 2020
Ocula Insight Art Basel Hong Kong Online Viewing Rooms: Ocula Advisory Selections By Sam Gaskin, Hong Kong Over 2,000 artworks are being uploaded to Art Basel Hong Kong's Online Viewing Rooms, which open to VIPs from 18–19 March, and to the public from 20–25 March. In constant correspondence with galleries, Ocula's Art Advisory team selects the best works to seek out.
Ocula Conversation Jens Faurschou By Anna Dickie, New York Instead of opening a gallery in New York where we would be just another gallery, I thought: let’s do it in Beijing where we can make a difference.
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Related Press Crater glory – how artists have responded to Earth’s nearest neighbour 1 July 2019, Apollo I remember exactly where and when I decided to write a book about the moon: lying on my back in a dentist's chair, waiting for the anaesthetic to take effect. To distract his patients, the dentist had tacked a poster to the ceiling: a NASA image of the earth from space at night. I was struck by the way so much of the northern hemisphere glitters...
Related Press ‘Dirt was as important as gold’: An Oral History of Robert Rauschenberg 27 June 2019, Frieze I'm preoccupied, at the moment, with the generosity of Robert Rauschenberg's art. This preoccupied his contemporaries, too, as John Giorno makes clear: 'The most important thing I got from Bob Rauschenberg was just being with his mind [...] when you spend a lot of time with a great person's mind, somehow it has a profound effect on you. One sort...
Related Press Too Big for a Booth? Art Basel Still Has Room for Your Art 11 June 2019, The New York Times Since it was begun in 2000, Unlimited , which is offered only at the fair in Basel, has proved to be a particularly popular draw. Most people attending the fair–there were 95,000 last year–are expected to visit the section, not only for the sheer wow factor of the works, but also for the relevance of its offerings. 'I often tell people that...
