Robert Rauschenberg at Thaddaeus Ropac

Two series of Robert Rauschenberg’s works produced in the early 1990s are on show in the exhibition Night Shades and Phantoms at Thaddaeus Ropac in London, which will open after the current lockdown restrictions are lifted.

Where his focus on the materiality of paint in 1950s New York alongside Jasper Johns became the precursor for Pop Art, these works from the early 1990s were revolutionary for his ability to assemble painting, photography, and sculpture into a single frame.

On this approach to art-making, the artist David Salle wrote, ‘Rauschenberg knew how to let forms and masses invade and affect each other, energising the surface to build a sense of pictorial consequence, itself part of something larger, deeper’.

Main image: Robert Rauschenberg, Florida Reservoir (Phantom) (1991) (detail). Silkscreen ink on anodised mirrored aluminium. 127.7 x 307 cm. © Robert Rauschenberg Foundation/Licensed by Adagp, Paris, 2020. Photo: Glenn Steigemann.