Robert Rauschenberg
The American Robert Rauschenberg, whose centennial the art world will celebrate in 2025, was one of the most important representatives of the American post-war avant-garde and was known for his mixed forms of sculpture and painting known as Combines, with which he broke through the two-dimensionality of the canvas in an era characterised by Abstract Expressionism. Over the course of his six-decade career, he worked in a variety of fields and forms, including painting, sculpture, printmaking, photography and performance.
Born on 22 October 1925 in the Texan harbour town of Port Arthur, Rauschenberg studied at the Kansas City Art Institute, the Académie Julian in Paris, at Black Mountain College in North Carolina with Josef Albers and at the Art Students League of New York, where he became a friend with Cy Twombly. At the experimental Black Mountain College he met the composer John Cage and the choreographer and dancer Merce Cunningham, with whom he realised more than twenty dance projects and events over the following decades in an artistic partnership characterised by creative independence and the utmost mutual respect. His stage, costume and light designs for Cunningham reflect Rauschenberg’s current artistic phases, while his involvement with dance art also influenced his own creative work, in which he integrated commercial and typically American signs, objects and materials from the everyday world, also experimenting with found materials.
Rauschenberg died on 12 May 2008 at the age of 82 on the island of Captiva in the state of Florida.