Pop Art – Robert Rauschenberg in Salzburg
He loved horses. And stripes. It is therefore not surprising that, as a combination of the two factors, zebras were Robert Rauschenberg’s favorite animals. This explains the step on a meta level to the football star Zinedine Zidane’s jersey: He played for the Italian club Juventus Turin in the 1990s. Shirt design: black and white stripes.
In the Rauschenberg exhibition “Japanese Clayworks” at Galerie Ropac, these elements – stripes, zebras, Zidane’s “zebra stripes” – appear alongside other pictorial quotations as references in the masterpiece “Mirthday Man (Ceramic) II.” from 1998. At the center of the monumental, breathtakingly multi-layered work is an X-ray image by Rauschenberg, which leads one to define the work as a self-portrait of the artist. Around the skeleton, individual strips such as film stills, photographs, collages, paper from several years are applied in layers to the ceramic, painted over with gestural brushstrokes and fired several times. A captivating journey of discovery through time and art history – a pictorial biography of the artist on Japanese ceramics.
Japanese influences
Which leads to the technical basis of the exhibition: Robert Rauschenberg frequently visited Japan in the 1980s and studied the craftsmanship of firing ceramics in detail. Together with the Otsuka Ohmi Ceramics Company, he carried out a process that allowed him to apply screen-printed motifs to thin but robust ceramic image carriers. This resulted in a series of works that combines elements of painting, photography and sculpture. In doing so, he regularly incorporated references to European art history such as da Vinci’s “Mona Lisa”, Botticelli’s “Birth of Venus” or the bicycle of his mentor Marcel Duchamp, as well as elements of contemporary Japanese art. Through intensive contacts and artistic discussions with artisans and artists, Rauschenberg integrated ideas and traditions into his work. In Japan as in other places around the world he traveled to. All of the works in the Salzburg exhibition are signed with his name in Japanese characters. Today the artist would probably have to put up with the accusation of “cultural appropriation”.
The exhibition, which is well worth seeing, shows most of the series outside of Japan for the first time. The dramaturgy of smaller formats, which work with the overpainting of repetitive basic motifs, through expansive sculptural works, in which the high level of craftsmanship of ceramics is impressively recognizable, to works that impress with an (over)painterly, fast expressionist style , ultimately results in a presentation in museum format. That is also the aim: the focus of the sales talks for the works, which are estimated at between 315,000 and 4.5 million euros, is clearly on museums and institutions.