Robert Rauschenberg - Contemporary Art Evening Sale London Wednesday, February 16, 2011 | Phillips

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  • Provenance

    Pace Wildenstein, New York; Collection of Mary Schiller Myers and Louis S. Myers

  • Catalogue Essay

    Robert Rauschenberg stands as one of the most inventive artists in American art. He was probably the first of his generation to chart a viable course out of Abstract Expressionism towards the formal integration of art and the reality of life. His approach to making art using discarded materials, everyday objects and appropriated images made redundant the distinctions between medium and genre, abstraction and representation, while his ‘flatbed picture plane' changed forever the relationship between artist, image and viewer.
    Throughout his career, Rauschenberg constantly experimented with new ways to construct a pictorial surface, from dye transfer to silkscreen and chemical imprint. The idea of combining and of noticing combinations of objects and images has remained at the core of Rauschenberg's work. Technically, ‘Combines' refers to his work from 1954 to 1962, when the artist began collaging newsprint and photographic materials in his work and the impetus to combine both painting materials and everyday objects. This pioneering work altered the course of modern art.
    As Pop Art emerged in the '60s, Rauschenberg turned away from three-dimensional combines and began to work in two dimensions, using magazine photographs of current events to create silk-screen prints. Throughout the '80s and '90s, Rauschenberg continued his experimentation, concentrating primarily on collage and new ways to transfer photographs. In the present lot Address Unknown, Rauschenberg has produced powerful accumulations of images that re-envisioned the relation of art to life while addressing the multiple reproducibility of images. Vegetable dye, newsprint and found photographic materials expanded this inventory of the external world, while exploring the limitations of mimetic effect.
     

20

Address Unknown

1998
Vegetable dye transfer on polylaminate.
158.8 x 154.9 cm (62 1/2 x 61 in).
Signed and dated 'Rauschenberg 98' lower centre.

Estimate
£250,000 - 350,000 

Contemporary Art Evening Sale

17 Feb 2011
London