Wall-Eyed Carp/ROCI JAPAN
Robert Rauschenberg
ROBERT RAUSCHENBERG, 1987. ACRYLIC AND FABRIC COLLAGE ON CANVAS.
Robert Rauschenberg saw the beauty in everything. Throughout his career, he experimented with countless mediums, taking inspiration from disparate movements before him and anticipating those that came after. He was a graphic artist, a painter, printmaker, a sculptor, photographer and performance artist, and each medium could not contain the breadth of ideas he wanted to express. After studying at Black Mountain College, he spent several years creating single colour works in the vein of Malevich, huge soaring canvases of pure white, black, or red. Yet in 1954 he began to work in the medium he called ‘Combines’. Rauschenberg collected discarded objects from the streets of New York and integrated them into painted works. More than simply found artworks, the objects entered a dialogue with colour, movement and Rauschenberg’s mind. For him, everything could be beautiful – from the Japanese kite in this work to toothpaste tubes and roadkill. ‘I really feel sorry for people who think things like soap dishes or mirrors or Coke bottles are ugly’, he said, ‘because they’re surrounded by things like that all day long, and it must make them miserable.’