Robert Rauschenberg 1965–1980

Drawn primarily from the Gallery’s collection, Robert Rauschenberg 1965–1980 explores the artist’s experimental, radical approach to artmaking. Rauschenberg is renowned for using everyday materials and the detritus of popular culture to investigate the intersection of art and life. He borrowed the repetition, serial imagery and subject matter of the mass media to subvert the familiar and expected and to deconstruct the media’s emergent power in contemporary life. His embrace of everyday materials and imagery was in reaction to the aesthetics of abstraction that had dominated American art during the 1950s, and was both a product and critique of the explosion in the circulation of images that characterized the postwar period. From billboard-sized prints to intimate drawings and large-scale fabric constructions, Robert Rauschenberg 1965–1980 provides a glimpse into the subject matter and material processes that occupied this modern master during a critical moment in his career.