Robert Raauschenberg: Abstract Expressionism To Contemporary Art
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Robert Rauschenberg (1925-2008) was a multidisciplinary artist considered by many as a key figure in the history of modern art. He has been considered as precursor to practically all post-war American art movements from Abstract Expressionism to Pop Art, yet he remained fiercely independent of any particular affiliation throughout his life, with an experimental approach that extended the boundaries of art opening possibilities for future artists.
Despite his deep admiration for the artists of Abstract Expressionism, he did not agree with many of his believes. The artist's enthusiasm for the found materials and his rejection of the anguish of Abstract Expressionism led him to seek new forms of expression.
In the first years of the 1950s he produced a series of monochromatic paintings based on different colours in which he…show more content… The printed images that Rauschenberg incorporates vary in density and size. They are juxtaposed in an apparently arbitrary way, without suggesting a specific story or event.
In Random Order (2003, p180) Rauschenberg explained this apparently random arrangement of the images: "I was bombarded with television sets and magazines, by the refuse, by the excess of the world... I thought that if I could paint or make an honest work it should incorporate all of those elements, which were and are reality ". The overload of visual information in contemporary society is as relevant today as when the pictures were made.
Throughout his career he dived in the spaces where all the arts are found, daring with performance, music, dance and theatre. But his Combines were the first clear evidence of his experimental instinct. With his Combines, Rauschenberg wanted art to be open to the world and that meant open to the space of the