A much-anticipated retrospective of American artist Robert Rauschenberg’s impressive six-decade-long career opened at London’s Tate Modern this December. For those in Paris, Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac presents Rauschenberg’s works from the Salvage series (1983-1985) at their Le Marais art gallery. Photographs – found or taken by the artist himself – are silkscreened on painted canvases. Rauschenberg, who passed away in 2008, defined new styles of art and relentlessly challenged the limits of visual expression. He worked across a wide range of mediums, including painting, sculpture, photography, prints and performance, and even combined them at times, as is the case with the Salvage series, considered as one of the artists’ finest works.
In parallel with the Salvage series, the gallery is also exhibiting Marcel Duchamp’s celebrated sculpture Porte-Bouteilles (Bottle Rack), together with a selection of drawings by the artist. The sculpture was bought by Robert Rauschenberg for his personal collection in 1959. Duchamp considered Porte Bouteilles to be his first readymade, or a transition from what he called “retinal art” to an intellectual approach to his practice. André Breton, in his Dictionnaire abrégé du surréalisme, explained readymade as an “ordinary object promoted to the dignity of an art object by the mere choice of the artist”.
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