TEMPORARY
EXHIBITION
TECHNICAL DATA
Title: Robert Rauschenberg: Gluts
Curators: Susan Davidson and David White
Venues: Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice; Museum Tinguely, Basel; and Guggenheim Museum
Bilbao
Dates: February 13, 2010September 12, 2010
Galleries: 301, 302, 303 and 304
Extraordinary metal assemblages by the great American artist Robert Rauschenberg
Almost two years after the death of Robert Rauschenberg (May 12, 2008), the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao has organized a posthumous tribute to this great artist with the exhibition Robert Rauschenberg: Gluts. From February 13 to September 12, 2010, this show will display nearly sixty creations that reveal a relatively unknown facet of his work with metal, made possible by generous loans from the Estate of Robert Rauschenberg and private collections and institutions in several different countries.
After having experimented with his famous Combineswhich blended two-dimensional painting with sculpture in the late 1950s, exploring the collaboration between art and technology in the 1960s, and focusing on the use of natural fibers of paper, cardboard and fabric in the 1970s, Rauschenbergs artistic attention shifted toward the exploration of the visual properties of metal. In 1986, Rauschenberg began to assemble found metal objects and experiment with his own photographic images screen-printed onto aluminum, stainless steel, bronze, brass or copper, in an attempt to capture the reflective, textural, sculptural and thematic possibilities of the material. The artist continued to work with this new material off and on until 1995.In November 1998, the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao hosted the most comprehensive retrospective to date on this American artist. The show was a highlight of the international exhibition calendar given the quantity and quality of the works displayed, and emphasized the extraordinary beauty of the formats presented in Frank Gehrys recently inaugurated spaces and gave rise to a fascinating language of dialogues and disciplines. Eleven years after that great retrospective, the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao has now come full circle with Gluts, the last series on which the artist worked before his death.