The Thyssen invitations you to enter a portray by Robert Rauschenberg | Culture | EUROtoday

The philosophy of Robert Rauschenberg (1925-2008) was, as described by his buddy the dancer Trisha Brown: “Let’s do things, it’s fun.” He was referring to issues as unusual as they had been groundbreaking for his time: inserting a bald eagle glued to a canvas, a goat caught in a tire on high of one other, or a quilt and a pillow splashed with paint, as if dripping blood, hanging from a wall. But his well-known mix workwhich redefined the bounds of sculpture and served as a bridge between summary expressionism and pop artwork American, had been only one stage of a multifaceted artist who by no means uninterested in altering registers. When he mastered a course of, he deserted it and did one thing else. He eradicated the borders between disciplines, along with combining portray with sculpture, collage and objects discovered on the streets of New York, he performed with display printing, tried his hand as a photographer and, beginning within the Fifties, discovered his nice ardour in dance.

After the success of those aesthetic combos, the american He started his experimentation with display printing —below the affect of Andy Warhol—, a brand new sort of approach that turned the brand new foundation of his work. Expressone of many masterpieces of that interval, is the one one by the well-known artist that belongs to the Thyssen Museum in Madrid, and this 12 months the artwork gallery wished to rejoice it with an set up: Rauschenberg: Express. On the transfer, curated by Marta Ruiz del Arbol and which goals to disclose the artist’s artistic course of and delve into the origins of the portray. “The work is usually placed in the museum in the place where history has placed it, but Robert Rauschenberg is much more than a transition in stages of art. With this presentation we intend to vindicate why it is completely current and why his legacy survives,” says the curator.

What the Madrid museum presents, and which might be open to the general public from February 3 to May 24, is a part of the worldwide commemoration of the centenary of the artist’s delivery that the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation has promoted since final 12 months with totally different actions world wide, from New York to Honolulu. Spain had already joined the celebration with an exhibition on the Juan March Foundation the place all of his plastic work was reviewed to point out it as an primarily photographic observe. The Thyssen is, in actuality, a small and easy montage in room 48 that exhibits, above all, a deep analysis work that goals to reconstruct the writer’s artistic course of to boost “one of the masterpieces of the museum’s modern collection,” in accordance with its director, Guillermo Solana, within the presentation to the media this Monday.

Express It is a good instance of that new approach, silkscreen, that enchanted the American artist. “He visits Andy Warhol’s studio and becomes fascinated with what he is doing. He asks for the Marilyn series and discovers the possibilities that commercial screen printing has applied to the field of Fine Arts. He asks for the supplier and immediately begins to work with this, let’s say, mechanical procedure,” explains curator Ruiz del Arbol. What the American did was configure photographic photos printed on silk panels that he then transferred to his canvases, superimposing and mixing them “without any hierarchy,” continues del Arbol, as a sort of collage. Rauschenberg accomplished the approach that Warhol already used with oil paint. “This is a work of transition. When Rauschenberg begins with a new technique he works in black and white, until suddenly, little by little, he can begin to introduce color. The first color he introduces is usually red. Here we already see that he is introducing red,” says the curator.

Although the exhibition doesn’t replicate it so simply for the viewer – there are just a few images and a brief video accompanying the big work – what the Tree and his group have carried out is hint the origin of that jumble of photos that make up the portray: a rider on the horse in the intervening time of leaping a fence, some dancers in motion, a climber hanging from his rope, or a nude descending a ladder – a really specific reference to the well-known work by Duchamp, introduced on the Armory Show in 1913. The horse is definitely Snowman, the Cinderella of American equestrianism, which went from being nothing to being a phenomenon; the nude is taken from the journal Life; and the {photograph} of the dancers is one which he took himself.

The latter is, the museum director acknowledges, crucial of all. “Many times his works have been interpreted as impossible to interpret, as the representation of the lack of meaning of the contemporary world and human life. But this is more than a shower of stimuli, it is a painting that seems very classic to me in a sense and very constructed and articulated,” says Solana. For him, it’s an “apotheosis of dance, a celebration of dance.” “The images he uses are the expression of one thing that avant-garde dance is looking for at the moment: everyday movements, objects, the absurdity of ordinary life, completely breaking the syntax of traditional dance. This kind of exaltation of the human body in movement, including horses that are very human for Rauschenberg, are a new concept of dance,” he concludes.

Screen printing got here into the artist’s life at a time when he established a artistic relationship with the dancer and choreographer Merce Cunningham, for whose firm he labored as a set designer, costume designer and lighting designer. He turned so dedicated to what he did that he relegated his pictorial exercise—or sculpture, or pictures, or no matter—to the free time he had between excursions with the group. In 1963 he made the leap as a choreographer and premiered his first work, The pelican, the place along with doing the surroundings, costumes and lighting, he additionally appeared spinning on skates with a parachute on his again, dancing in the dead of night with a flashlight tied to 1 foot. “I had many extravagant ideas to disguise the fact that I was not, in fact, a dancer,” he as soon as mentioned. The identical 12 months as that premiere, it ended Express.

The work was additionally half, a 12 months after its creation, of the set that the United States introduced on the Venice Biennale through which Rauschenberg was controversially awarded the grand prize for portray, changing into the primary North American artist to acquire it. “We know that there was interference from the United States Department of Information to ensure that this award was granted. It was a scandal because above all it represented the definitive relief of the cultural supremacy of Europe in favor of the United States,” acknowledges del Arbol. In that exhibition, by the way in which, as a result of its measurement, virtually all of the works from the United States had been exhibited in a palace on the Grand Canal. After the award, a few of them, Express included, they moved to the official premises. The Thyssen montage exhibits images as implausible as they’re seductive of the large portray, right now deeply pampered, strolling by the canals of Venice, bare and with out safety, or the streets within the arms of a pair of males – some in shorts, a sleeveless shirt and barefoot – who drag the mud by which they stroll.