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The Museum Tinguely is presenting from October 13, 2009 to January 17, 2010 a little known body of Rauschenberg?s work in metal. Always one to recycle, Rauschenberg found new uses for what others tossed aside, reinvigorating detritus with a revealing second life. Faced with disparate objects littering his studio, he applied a direct approach to the Gluts (1986?89 and 1991?95), his final series of sculpture. For nearly a decade, Rauschenberg frequented the Gulf Iron and Metal Junkyard outside Fort Myers, Florida, near his home, gathering metal parts from traffic signs, exhaust pipes, radiator grills, metal awnings, and so on, which he incorporated into these poetic, humorous assemblages, where the whole becomes greater than the sum of its parts. 

The exhibition was organised by the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice where the first venue was held this summer. A year after the death of Robert Rauschenberg, it celebrated the memory of this great artist. The exhibition is curated by Susan Davidson, Senior Curator for Collections & Exhibitions at the Guggenheim Museum of New York and David White, Curator at the Estate of Robert Rauschenberg. Parallel to the exhibition Gluts, the Museum Tinguely presents a further show on the collaboration between Robert Rauschenberg and Jean Tinguely at the beginning of the Sixties.

In 1964 Rauschenberg was awarded the Grand Prix for Painting at the 32^nd Venice Biennale - an event that established his reputation internationally. It also brought into sharp focus the rivalry between New York and Paris for leadership in the visual arts. By winning the Grand Prix at the age of 38, Rauschenberg interrupted the post-war sequence of prizes awarded to elderly European masters of the pre-war. Alan Solomon, the US Pavilion commissioner, brought to Venice iconic Combines, such as Factum I and II (both 1957), Bed (1958), Canyon (1959), Winter Pool (1959), and Third Time Painting (1961). 

Of the Gluts series, Susan Davidson relates that Rauschenberg?s artistic attention in the 1980s turned toward an exploration of the visual properties of metal. Whether assembling found metal objects or experimenting with his own photographic images screen-printed onto aluminium, stainless steel, bronze, brass, or copper, Rauschenberg sought to capture the reflective, textural, sculptural, and thematic possibilities of the material. Rauschenberg?s first body of work in this new material was the Gluts. The series was inspired by a visit to Houston on the occasion of ?Robert Rauschenberg, Work from Four Series: A Sesquicentennial Exhibition? at the Contemporary Arts Museum. In the mid 1980s, the Texas economy was in the throes of a recession due to a glut (or surplus of supply) in the oil market. Rauschenberg took note of the economic devastation of the region as he collected gas-station signs and deteriorated automotive and industrial parts littering the landscape. Upon his return to his Captiva, Florida, studio, he transformed the scrap-metal detritus into wall reliefs and freestanding sculptures that recalled his earlier Combines. Asked to comment on the meaning of the Gluts, Rauschenberg offered: ?It?s a time of glut. Greed is rampant. I?m just exposing it, trying to wake people up. I simply want to present people with their ruins [?] I think of the Gluts as souvenirs without nostalgia. What they are really meant to do is give people an experience of looking at everything in terms of what its many possibilities might be.? Rauschenberg chose these objects not only for their everydayness but also for their formal properties. Individually and collectively, materials such as these are the very foundation of his artistic vocabulary. His empathy for such detritus was visceral. ?Well, I have sympathy for abandoned objects, so I always try to rescue them as much as I can.?

The Catalouge Robert Rauschenberg: Gluts is edited in a German edition with a preface by Roland Wetzel, a foreword by Richard Armstrong and Philip Rylands, an introduction by Susan Davdison and David White as well as essays by Susan Davidson, Mimi Thompson und Trisha Brown. Guggenheim Publications, New York, 2009, 120 SS., with numerous black-and-white and coloured illustrations, CHF 42.-

October 14, 2009 to January 17, 2010

Museum Tinguely, Paul Sacher-Anlage 1, CH - 4002 Basel
Opening hours: Tuesday to Sunday 11 ? 19 / Monday closed 

http://www.tinguely.ch