Robert Rauschenberg (Port Arthur, Texas, 1925 – Captiva Island, Florida, 2008) was a key figure in American art of the second half of the 20th century and a pivotal artist in the transition from Abstract Expressionism to Pop Art and contemporary interdisciplinary practices. His work was characterized by a constant experimental approach and a desire to dissolve the boundaries between media, languages, and disciplines.
After serving in the U.S. Navy during World War II, Rauschenberg began his artistic training in the late 1940s. He studied at the Kansas City Art Institute, the Académie Julian in Paris, and later at Black Mountain College, where he came into contact with fundamental figures of the avant-garde such as Josef Albers, John Cage, and Merce Cunningham. This environment was crucial for the development of his open conception of art and his interest in collaboration between different disciplines.
In the early 1950s, he created radical works such as the White Paintings, Black Paintings, and Red Paintings, which challenged the traditional boundaries of painting. Between 1954 and 1964, he developed his celebrated combine paintings, integrating paint, collage, found objects, and everyday materials, incorporating fragments of urban life and consumer society directly into the pictorial space. These works represented a break with the formal autonomy championed by Abstract Expressionism.
From 1962 onward, he began working intensively with commercial silkscreen printing, a technique that allowed him to incorporate photographic images from newspapers, magazines, and his personal archive, enlarging, repeating, and superimposing them onto the canvas. With this, he constructed a dynamic, fragmented visual language deeply connected to contemporary culture, in indirect dialogue with Pop Art, while always maintaining a unique perspective.
In 1964, Rauschenberg received the Grand Prize for Painting at the Venice Biennale, becoming the first American artist to do so, an award that solidified his international standing. Throughout his career, he also worked in set design, performance art, and choreography, collaborating closely with Merce Cunningham and his dance company, as well as with musicians, scientists, and engineers.
In the following decades, he continued to explore new materials and technologies, maintaining a practice marked by curiosity and a commitment to his time. In 1970, he founded Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.), a pioneering initiative in collaboration between artists and scientists. Until the end of his life, Rauschenberg championed an art open to the world, capable of integrating the everyday, the political, and the experimental into a single practice.
