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Lot Essay
Plumbing the areas between art and life, Rauschenberg's work is an investigation of boundaries. Fusing painting, sculpture, photography and print-making with the objets trouvés of urban detritus, the artist has earned a unique position in twentieth-century art; indeed, his ability to erase barriers between genres and combine disparate elements has rendered him a model for subsequent generations. Lipstick finds Rauschenberg at the height of his prowess, channeling his decades-long explorations into a mélange of techniques, subjects and materials.
Executed on a massive scale (the yardstick running along the lower left edge acting with mischievous emphasis) and teeming with images culled from magazines, newspapers and photographs, Lipstick conforms to Leo Steinberg's classification of Rauschenberg's work as a 'flatbed' receptor - its surface operating more like that of a printing press for the accumulation of culture (rather than a traditional pictorial space for the depiction of illusions). Since the artist's breakthrough in 1954 - the year that witnessed his Combines and Combine Drawings - Rauschenberg has reconceived the picture plane, contaminating it with his introduction of the banal, pushing its limits beyond the two-dimensional surface and eschewing its narrative cohesion for the juxtaposition of unrelated autobiographical, art-historical and mass media references. Revisiting this strategy in a body of work that he began in the mid-seventies through the early eighties - the Spreads of which Lipstick is an outstanding example -he resuscitates the various strategies employed over the years, including the silkscreen and transfer of found photographic images as well their direct application, adding gestural painterly touches and sculptural elements to the mix. An outstanding example, Lipstick embodies Rauschenberg's 'vernacular glance'; flitting from one dissonance to the next, the work is a testament to the fleeting randomness of modern experience. Considering that 'spread' is a term used in the West to connote an expanse of land, the artist's venture into the scale witnessed in Lipstick replicates a mini-environment in of itself, encompassing the viewer within its parameters.
Presenting the significant developments in the artist's career with references to past motifs as well as current trends, the immense scale of Lipstick stages a sort of self-contained mini-retrospective of the artist's prolific career. Particularly resonant is the red umbrella which blooms as the focus of the work, recalling Rauschenberg's earliest Combine such as Charlene (1954). Like the title itself - Lipstick - this motif captures the essence of the artist's oeuvre in which the utilitarian nature of objects engage in recurrent dynamic between the realms of everyday existence and of aesthetic concerns. Clinging to the anthropomorphic ghosts of its various components, the grid-like arrangement of the present work further exerts an architectonic presence as if keyed to the human subject.
Executed on a massive scale (the yardstick running along the lower left edge acting with mischievous emphasis) and teeming with images culled from magazines, newspapers and photographs, Lipstick conforms to Leo Steinberg's classification of Rauschenberg's work as a 'flatbed' receptor - its surface operating more like that of a printing press for the accumulation of culture (rather than a traditional pictorial space for the depiction of illusions). Since the artist's breakthrough in 1954 - the year that witnessed his Combines and Combine Drawings - Rauschenberg has reconceived the picture plane, contaminating it with his introduction of the banal, pushing its limits beyond the two-dimensional surface and eschewing its narrative cohesion for the juxtaposition of unrelated autobiographical, art-historical and mass media references. Revisiting this strategy in a body of work that he began in the mid-seventies through the early eighties - the Spreads of which Lipstick is an outstanding example -he resuscitates the various strategies employed over the years, including the silkscreen and transfer of found photographic images as well their direct application, adding gestural painterly touches and sculptural elements to the mix. An outstanding example, Lipstick embodies Rauschenberg's 'vernacular glance'; flitting from one dissonance to the next, the work is a testament to the fleeting randomness of modern experience. Considering that 'spread' is a term used in the West to connote an expanse of land, the artist's venture into the scale witnessed in Lipstick replicates a mini-environment in of itself, encompassing the viewer within its parameters.
Presenting the significant developments in the artist's career with references to past motifs as well as current trends, the immense scale of Lipstick stages a sort of self-contained mini-retrospective of the artist's prolific career. Particularly resonant is the red umbrella which blooms as the focus of the work, recalling Rauschenberg's earliest Combine such as Charlene (1954). Like the title itself - Lipstick - this motif captures the essence of the artist's oeuvre in which the utilitarian nature of objects engage in recurrent dynamic between the realms of everyday existence and of aesthetic concerns. Clinging to the anthropomorphic ghosts of its various components, the grid-like arrangement of the present work further exerts an architectonic presence as if keyed to the human subject.