January 11 – February 9, 2008
“Robert
Rauschenberg (October 22, 1925 – May 12, 2008) was an American painter and graphic
artist whose early works anticipated the pop art movement.” - Wikipedia
Rauschenberg was born in Port Arthur, Texas in October 1925, he attended
the University Of Texas to study pharmacology,
but then left to join the US Navy and fight in WWII, this is where he decided
to study art. During Rauschenberg’s career,
he was quoted as saying that he wanted to work "in the gap between art and
life" this then lead to him questioning the distinction between art
objects and everyday objects. Rauschenberg’s first solo exhibition was held at
the Betty Parsons Gallery, New York, in 1951.
In this image you can see a collage of lots of different key figures and events
from the 1940’s onwards, you can see JFK, Martin Luther King’s death, an astronaut
from the moon landing, pictures from the Vietnam war and other events that were
big news in America.
It seems that Rauschenberg has glued images to paper, cut up and stuck down
over other images to give a layered effect, even the colours don’t match on all
the pictures and they look like they don’t have anything to do with each other,
the image forces you to only concentrate on one thing at a time. The only
images that I can see that link together is maybe the black man in the corner
seems to be resting something on Martin Luther King’s corpse, this may suggest
something about black civil rights. Rauschenberg has maybe made this so
confusing to show how much has gone on in such a short time, reflecting back on
past events that effected most of the United States.
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