Robert Rauschenberg was an American painter and graphic artist whose early works anticipated the pop art movement. He is known for making use of non-traditional materials, for instance his “Combines”of the 1950s where he employed materials and objects in innovative combinatios, and questioning the distinction between art and everyday objects. He also worked with painting, sculpture, photography, printmaking, performance, music and collage to produce his work.
He studied at the Kansas City Art Institute (1946–1947), the Académie Julien, Paris (1947), and with Josef Albers and John Cage at Black Mountain College, North Carolina (1948–1950).
Traveling widely, he was based in New York City from 1950, where he and Jasper Johns paved the way for pop art of the 1960s. He worked with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, New York, as costume and stage designer (1955–64).
An imaginative and eclectic artist, he used a mix of sculpture and paint in works he called ‘combines’. From the late 1950s he incorporated sound and motors in his work and silk-screen transfers.
Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, he experimented with collage and new ways to transfer photographs. In 1997 the Solomon R Guggenheim Museum, New York City, staged a major exhibition of his works, showcasing the breadth and beauty of his work and its influence over the second half of the century.
Galeria Luisa Strina started in 2015 to work with The Robert Rauschenberg Foundation.