Warhol, Pollock and other American spaces @ Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum, Madrid

Warhol, Pollock and other American spaces

Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum, Madrid

21 October 2025 - 25 January 2026

Robert Rauschenberg

Express, 1963

Oil, silkscreen ink and collage on canvas,

184.2 x 305.2 cm

Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bernemisza

Audrey Flack

Abstract Expressionist Landscape (with Clouds), 1951

Oil on canvas, 74.93 x 101.6 cm

Museo FAMM, Mougins (The Levett Collection)

Photo: Fraser Marr

Cy Twombly

Detail of Pan, Bassano in Teverina, 1980

Color dry-print, 38.1 x 30.5 cm

Collection of Larry Gagosian

© Fondazione Nicola Del Roscio

Photo: Rob McKeever

Courtesy Gagosian

Andy Warhol's fascination with Jackson Pollock is well known; his obsession with having one of his works in his extensive art collection, as well as the relationship between his famous car crash series and the notorious accident that ended Pollock's life one night in August 1956.

The Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza is organising an exhibition which brings together the work of these two key names of 20th-century art, shown alongside that of other artists who were reconsidering issues relating to the new spatial strategies at this same time. Other artists include, among others, Audrey Flack, Robert Rauschenberg, Marisol Escobar, Cy Twombly...

Andy Warhol and Jackson Pollock are two extraordinarily complex figures, seemingly very different but in fact united, like an entire generation of artists, by their interest in change in the pictorial tradition, spatial issues and a fascination with large formats. 

MUSEO NACIONAL THYSSEN-BORNEMISZA

Paseo del Prado, 8. 28014, Madrid

www.museothyssen.org

Robert Rauschenberg’s New York Pictures from the Real World @ Museum of the City of New York

Robert Rauschenberg’s New York 

Pictures from the Real World 

Museum of the City of New York

September 13, 2025 – April 19, 2026

In celebration of the centennial of Robert Rauschenberg (1925–2008), and in partnership with the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, the Museum of the City of New York (MCNY) presents Robert Rauschenberg’s New York: Pictures from the Real World, a major exhibition. This dynamic show explores Rauschenberg’s innovative integration of photography and found objects into his art, reflecting his deep engagement with “the real world” and his complex relationship with New York City.

Widely regarded as one of the most influential artists of postwar New York, Rauschenberg’s irreverent approach to art-making pushed the envelope for an entire generation, reshaping the art world in New York and around the world. At the heart of his practice was a desire to incorporate the tangible world around him into his art. Gathering materials and inspiration from his surroundings, he often brought found objects and images sourced or reproduced from magazines and newspapers into his paintings and sculptures. But Robert Rauschenberg was not merely a user of found imagery; he was also a photographer with a bold creative vision—an essential aspect of his artistic practice that is the focus of the exhibition.

The show is organized into three sections—Early Photographs, In + Out City Limits, and Photography in Painting—tracing the evolution of Rauschenberg’s photographic practice and its interplay with painting, sculpture, and assemblage. His earliest images are largely intimate portraits and experiments with formal elements such as framing, light and shadow, and flattening the picture plane.

The centerpiece of the exhibition is In + Out City Limits, a three-year (1979–81) photographic survey conducted across the United States—a project Rauschenberg had originally conceived decades earlier as a student at Black Mountain College in North Carolina. His New York photographs from this project reveal his fascination with the signs and symbols of human culture, even in the most humble or discarded remnants of the city. Together, these photographs emphasize his observational rigor and his constant effort to channel the fleeting, ineffable moments of life into his work—revealing a deep sensitivity to the social landscape.

In addition, the exhibition presents a selection of works created between 1963 and 1994 that combine Rauschenberg’s New York City photographs with images taken around the world, illustrating how he recontextualized his photographic imagery through his innovative creative process.

“By incorporating photographs and everyday objects into his artworks, Robert Rauschenberg placed the realities of life at the center of his art, blurring traditionally held boundaries between the two and compelling us to look more closely at the world around us,” said Sean Corcoran, Senior Curator of Prints and Photographs at MCNY. “Our exhibition will highlight Rauschenberg’s enduring relevance, as his work continues to resonate in an increasingly image-saturated world.”

“The Museum of the City of New York is thrilled to honor Robert Rauschenberg’s centennial,” added Stephanie Hill Wilchfort, Ronay Menschel Director and President of MCNY. “This exhibition not only underscores Rauschenberg’s profound impact on the art world but also celebrates his deep connection to New York City, which shaped much of his creative journey. We are grateful to the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation for its partnership and support, which makes this exploration of his transformative work possible.”

Courtney J. Martin, Executive Director of the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, remarked, “We are honored to support the Museum of the City of New York’s thoughtful and timely exhibition. New York was not only a backdrop for Rauschenberg’s practice, it was also a catalyst for the ways that his objects would take shape for the entirety of his career. This exhibition reminds us how the city’s energy, texture, and unpredictability were central to his groundbreaking approach to artmaking.”

The exhibition is accompanied by a richly illustrated companion book, co-published by MCNY and Giles Ltd, featuring contributions from Sean Corcoran and Helen Hsu, Associate Curator for Research, Robert Rauschenberg Foundation.

About the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation

The Robert Rauschenberg Foundation builds on the legacy of artist Robert Rauschenberg, emphasizing his belief that artists can drive social change. Rauschenberg sought to act in the “gap” between art and life, valuing chance and collaboration across disciplines. As such, the Foundation celebrates new and even untested ways of thinking.

About Rauschenberg 100

Robert Rauschenberg’s (1925-2008) strong conviction that engagement with art can nurture people’s sensibilities as individuals, community members, and citizens was key to his ethos. The Centennial celebrations seek to allow audiences familiar with him and those encountering the artist for the first time to form fresh perspectives about his artwork. A year of global activities and exhibitions in honor of Rauschenberg’s Centennial reexamines the artist through a contemporary lens, highlighting his enduring influence on generations of artists and advocates for social progress. The Centennial’s activation of the artist’s legacy promotes cross-disciplinary explorations and creates opportunities for critical dialogue. 

For more information and continued updates on Centennial programming and news, visit rauschenberg100.org

MCNY - MUSEUM OF THE CITY OF NEW YORK

www.mcny.org

Robert Rauschenberg: Sympathy for Abandoned Objects @ Gladstone Gallery, New York - Survey exhibition of Rauschenberg sculptural practice

Robert Rauschenberg 

Sympathy for Abandoned Objects 

Gladstone Gallery, New York 

May 1 - June 14, 2025 

Presented in collaboration with the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation on the occasion of the artist’s Centennial, Gladstone presents the first survey of Rauschenberg’s sculptural practice in thirty years, spanning his production from the 1950s through the late 1990s.

Examining Rauschenberg’s sculptures through the lens of scale, the exhibition showcases over 30 sculptures that relate in size to the human body, whether floor-, pedestal-, or wall-based. Drawing from myriad media and disrupting the distinction between abstraction and empirical representation, Rauschenberg's sculptures are rooted in his career-long dedication to artistic experimentation.

Robert Rauschenberg is renowned for blurring the line between artistic genres, painterly gesture, and three-dimensionality. The artist maintained a robust sculptural practice throughout his long and prodigious career. Underscoring the artist’s remarkable use of found and readymade materials, the works on view are assembled from industrial detritus, everyday objects, decorative items, and organic forms. They are the result of improvisatory gestures—gathering, twisting, combining, adhering, tying—that Rauschenberg described as responses to items found in his environment, “treasures” that he would bring back to his studio, seeing in them a potential for new form. Claiming a “sympathy for abandoned objects,” he created a body of strictly sculptural work that is rarely presented as such.

For this exhibition, Gladstone presents key works from various series, including the Scatole Personali (1952–53), Elemental Sculptures (1953/59), Combines (1954-64), Kabal American Zephyrs (1981– 83/1985/1987–88), Gluts (1986–89/1991–94), and the Rauschenberg Overseas Culture Interchange (ROCI; 1984–91) in an installation designed by Selldorf Architects to reveal the continuity of his unique vocabulary within an expansive set of sculptural positions. Given Rauschenberg’s protean imagination, this exhibition also features a number of his sculptures that were not aligned with specific series and exist on their own formal terms. Key loans from institutional and private collections augment the selection of work from the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation to further argue for the artist’s keen sculptural sensibility, even if he resisted aligning himself with one medium. This exhibition traces the trajectory of Rauschenberg’s creative output as a whole, with the three-dimensional objects serving as key touchpoints in an expansive and almost uncategorizable oeuvre. The last survey of Rauschenberg’s purely sculptural output prior to this show was in 1995 at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth.

This exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue designed by Chris Svensson with an essay by sculpture expert, Lisa Le Feuvre, Executive Director of the Holt/Smithson Foundation, entries on each of the individual sculptural series represented, and detailed exhibition histories.

In 2025, the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation commemorates Robert Rauschenberg’s 100th birthday with an international celebration of the artist’s expansive creativity, spirit of curiosity, and commitment to change.

ROBERT RAUSCHENBERG

Born on October 22, 1925 in Port Arthur, Texas, Robert Rauschenberg worked in what he called the gap between art and life. Over the course of his sixty-year career, Rauschenberg’s art embodied a spirit of experimentation with new materials and techniques. Dubbed an enfant terrible for his assemblages of urban detritus (the Combines of 1954-64), Robert Rauschenberg continued exploring many different mediums and technological advancements in the years following his 1970 decampment to Captiva Island in the Gulf of Mexico, off the Florida coast.

Although he demurred from affiliations with any particular movement, he has been called a forerunner of essentially every postwar artistic development since Abstract Expressionism.

In addition to his own artmaking practice, Robert Rauschenberg became an advocate for artists and the creative community at large. In September 1970, he founded Change, Inc., a non-profit organization that helped artists with emergency expenses. From 1984-91, he personally funded the Rauschenberg Overseas Culture Interchange (ROCI), traveling to ten countries outside of the United States to spark cross-cultural dialogue through art.

Robert Rauschenberg died on May 12, 2008 in his Captiva studio. His artistic legacy and his lifelong commitment to collaboration with artists, performers, writers, artisans, and engineers worldwide was recognized long before his death. His expansive artistic philosophy lives on through his highly innovative and influential work to the present day.

About the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation

The Robert Rauschenberg Foundation builds on the legacy of artist Robert Rauschenberg, emphasizing his belief that artists can drive social change. Robert Rauschenberg sought to act in the “gap” between art and life, valuing chance and collaboration across disciplines. As such, the Foundation celebrates new and even untested ways of thinking.

GLADSTONE GALLERY

530 West 21st Street, New York City

www.gladstonegallery.com

De Maria, Fontana, Judd, Manzoni, Merz, Picasso, Rauschenberg, Serra, Warhol @ Gagosian, Paris

De Maria, Fontana, Judd, Manzoni, Merz, Picasso, Rauschenberg, Serra, Warhol

Gagosian, Paris

2 avril - 31 mai 2025

Please scroll down for the English version

Tout acte de destruction est aussi un acte de création. Détruire, c’est ouvrir un espace, dégager un chemin pour quelque chose de nouveau.

—Gilles Deleuze, Différence et répétition, 1968

Cette exposition collective présente une conversation entre des artistes d’après-guerre ayant questionné les conventions de la forme, du matériau et de la perception, et souligne l’évolution de leurs pratiques. L’installation rassemble des œuvres majeures de Walter De Maria, Lucio Fontana, Donald Judd, Piero Manzoni, Mario Merz, Pablo Picasso, Robert Rauschenberg, Richard Serra et Andy Warhol.

Ces œuvres révèlent la façon dont la répétition dans l’art peut redéfinir les possibilités perceptuelles et formelles, en examinant la manière dont les artistes ont utilisé la sérialité, la variation et l’accumulation pour déstabiliser les schémas conventionnels de la vue et de la pensée. La déclaration de Picasso, « Dans mon cas, une image est la somme de destructions », résonne avec la pensée de Deleuze. Parallèlement aux recherches du philosophe sur la différenciation et l’itération, Serra affirme que « la répétition est le rituel de l’obsession ».

Le passage de Picasso à la sculpture, les structures modulaires et sérielles de Judd, l’insistance de Serra sur le processus de création et son exploration incessante de la matérialité, ainsi que les œuvres et sculptures à caractère durable de De Maria démontrent que la répétition n’est jamais statique, mais qu’elle est au contraire une force de renouvellement. Les œuvres de Fontana, Concetto spaziale, sont percées, ouvrant le plan de l’image à un espace infini, tandis que la série Achrome de Manzoni renonce à la couleur, à la représentation et à l’allusion pour mettre l’accent sur la présence matérielle. Dans leur art, Rauschenberg et Merz reconfigurent radicalement les objets quotidiens, tandis que la multiplication des images de Warhol déplace leurs significations reçues en faveur de nouvelles interprétations. Ensemble, ces oeuvres offrent une réflexion opportune sur la nature cyclique de l’innovation artistique et sur les relations changeantes entre le passé et le présent.

_____

Every act of destruction is also an act of creation. To destroy is to open up a space, to clear a path for something new.

—Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 1968

This group exhibition presents a conversation between postwar artists who challenged the conventions of form, material, and perception, highlighting the evolution of their practices. On view through May 31, the installation gathers defining works by Walter De Maria, Lucio Fontana, Donald Judd, Piero Manzoni, Mario Merz, Pablo Picasso, Robert Rauschenberg, Richard Serra, and Andy Warhol.

These works reveal how repetition in art can redefine perceptual and formal possibilities, examining how artists have employed seriality, variation, and accumulation to destabilize conventional patterns of sight and thought. Picasso’s declaration “In my case, a picture is a sum of destructions” resonates with the thinking of Gilles Deleuze. Parallelling the philosopher’s inquiries into differentiation and iteration is Serra’s credo that “Repetition is the ritual of obsession.”

Picasso’s turn to sculpture, Judd’s modular and serial structures, Serra’s insistence on process and his relentless exploration of materiality, and De Maria’s durational works and sculptures demonstrate that repetition is never static, but rather a force of renewal. Fontana’s Concetto spaziale works are pierced, opening the picture plane up to infinite space, while Manzoni’s Achrome series negates color, representation, and allusion to emphasize material presence. Rauschenberg and Merz radically reconfigure everyday objects in their art, whereas Warhol’s multiplication of images displaces their received meanings in favor of new interpretations. Together they offer a timely reflection on the cyclical nature of artistic innovation and the shifting relationships between past and present.

GAGOSIAN, PARIS

4 rue de Ponthieu, 75008 Paris

gagosian.com

Point, Line, Plane: The William B. Jordan and Robert Dean Brownlee Bequest @ Dallas Museum of Art

Point, Line, Plane: The William B. Jordan and Robert Dean Brownlee Bequest

Dallas Museum of Art 

September 26, 2021 – January 9, 2022

Edgar Degas

Seated Male Nude (recto), 1856-1858 

Pencil on paper

Dallas Museum of Art 

Bequest of William B. Jordan and Robert Dean Brownlee, 2019.72.21.A-B 

Berthe Morisot 

Harbor Scene (Isle of Wight), 1880

Watercolor on paper 

Dallas Museum of Art 

Bequest of William B. Jordan and Robert Dean Brownlee, 2019.72.39

Rosa Bonheur 

Pattes de lion, 1880-1885 

Black crayon on medium-weight wove paper with stumping 

Dallas Museum of Art 

Bequest of William B. Jordan and Robert Dean Brownlee, 2019.72.5 

At the Dallas Museum of Art (DMA), an exhibition honors a remarkable gift from the estate of distinguished scholar William B. Jordan and his husband, Robert Dean Brownlee. Celebrating the establishment of the Museum’s Works on Paper Department, Point, Line, Plane: The William B. Jordan and Robert Dean Brownlee Bequest is composed of approximately 50 works donated to the DMA by Jordan and Brownlee. The exhibition includes drawings, watercolors, prints, photography, sculpture, and decorative arts by some of the most important European and American artists of the past three centuries. Point, Line, Plane is curated by Sue Canterbury, The Pauline Gill Sullivan Curator of American Art and Interim Allen and Kelli Questrom Curator of Works on Paper.

“Bill and Robert were kind, intelligent, and generous souls, invested in creating a lasting impact on the arts in North Texas and at the DMA,” said Dr. Agustín Arteaga, the DMA’s Eugene McDermott Director. “Together they built a wonderful personal collection that shows their admiration for the unique intimacy contained in works on paper. We were honored to be recipients of their generosity, and we pay tribute to their mission by sharing these treasured works with our visitors."

Adolf Hiremy-Hirschl

Head of a Young Woman, 1890s

Black and white chalk on brown paper 

Dallas Museum of Art 

Bequest of William B. Jordan and Robert Dean Brownlee, 2019.72.29

Jean–Baptiste Camille Corot 

Paysage, n.d.

Charcoal on paper

Dallas Museum of Art

Bequest of William B. Jordan and Robert Dean Brownlee, 2019.72.15

Jordan and Brownlee were key figures in the arts community of Dallas–Fort Worth. While Brownlee’s focus was architecture and interior design, Jordan was a scholar and connoisseur of Spanish paintings. His influence on the region’s arts institutions is immeasurable. Serving as the founding director of the Meadows Museum (1967–1980) and as deputy director of the Kimbell Art Museum (1981–1990), Jordan raised the quality and profile of both collections. He began his affiliation with the DMA as an adjunct curator for European art (1977–1982) and evolved to become an invaluable member of the Museum’s Board of Trustees.

Both deeply interested in art, the couple assembled a collection over decades that included works by Paul Cézanne, Edgar Degas, Rosa Bonheur, Berthe Morisot, Auguste Rodin, Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, Salvador Dalí, Jackson Pollock, Josef Albers, Cy Twombly, Ellsworth Kelly, and Robert Rauschenberg, among others. While the collection varied in types of objects and historical eras, works on paper were at its core. Point, Line Plane features approximately 50 works spanning the ancient to the contemporary, demonstrating an enduring fascination with artists’ use of expressive line, the depiction of the figure, and dialogues across media.

Robert Rauschenberg 

Autobiography: three works, 1968

Offset lithographs on paper

Dallas Museum of Art

Bequest of William B. Jordan and Robert Dean Brownlee, 2019.72.45.A-C, 

© Robert Rauschenberg Foundation. 

Image courtesy of the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation

Ellsworth Kelly 

Untitled, 2001 

Single-color lithograph 

Dallas Museum of Art

Bequest of William B. Jordan and Robert Dean Brownlee, 2019.72.31

© Ellsworth Kelly Foundation, Courtesy Matthew Marks Gallery

“While Bill and Robert collected across several media, it is apparent they appreciated drawings in particular for their immediacy as visible revelations of an artist’s initial concept. It is extraordinarily intimate in that it’s akin to witnessing the birth of the creative spark, no matter how long ago that moment took place,” said curator Sue Canterbury.

The DMA’s Works on Paper Department was established in 2019 through a group of visionary gifts to the Museum: a gift from the estate of Jordan and Brownlee, which provided significant funds to establish The William B. Jordan and Robert Dean Brownlee Endowment to support the department; the creation of a new, endowed curatorial position, The Allen and Kelli Questrom Curator of Works on Paper, made possible through an extraordinary $3 million bequest to the Museum by Allen and Kelli Questrom; and Jordan’s and Brownlee’s donation of nearly 80 works to the Museum, including 58 works on paper as well as antiquities, 20th-century furniture, 19th-century oil paintings, ceramics, sculpture, and silver.

Point, Line, Plane: The William B. Jordan and Robert Dean Brownlee Bequest is organized by the Dallas Museum of Art. 

DALLAS MUSEUM OF ART - DMA

1717 North Harwood, Dallas, Texas 75201

dma.org

Robert Rauschenberg at Tate Modern, London

Robert Rauschenberg
Tate Modern, London
1 December 2016 - 2 April 2017

Tate Modern’s major exhibition of the work of ROBERT RAUSCHENBERG (1925-2008), organised in collaboration with The Museum of Modern Art in New York, will be the first posthumous retrospective and the most comprehensive survey of the artist’s work for 20 years, opening on 1 December 2016.

Controversially winning the prize for painting at the Venice Biennale in 1963, Robert Rauschenberg blazed a new trail for art in the second half of the twentieth century. Moving between painting, sculpture, photography, print-making, technology, stage design and performance, he refused to accept conventional boundaries in art and in life, his quest for innovation fired by his openness to the world, his enthusiasm for collaboration and his passion for travel.

Each chapter of Robert Rauschenberg’s six-decade career will be represented by major international loans that rarely travel. Among these is a selection of his iconic Combines, hybrids between painting and sculpture, which include Monogram 1955-59, travelling to the UK for the first time in over half a century, and Bed 1955. Tate Modern will also show the signature silkscreen paintings which signalled Robert Rauschenberg’s early commitment to political activism, including Retroactive II 1964, which portrays John F. Kennedy, who had recently been assassinated.

The exhibition begins by considering Robert Rauschenberg’s early experiments at Black Mountain College, a hotbed for innovation in the late 1940s and early 1950s where he embarked on his first collaborations with fellow artists and friends John Cage, Merce Cunningham, Jasper Johns, David Tudor, Cy Twombly and Susan Weil. This time lead to his seminal Erased de Kooning Drawing in 1953, which paid tribute to the achievements of abstract expressionism as much as it tested the limits of what art could be. The artist’s work with Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T), an organisation of which he was a founder and which developed collaborations between artists and engineers in the 1960s, will be explored, showing how he helped to blur the boundaries between the visual arts, performance and science.

In the early 1970s Robert Rauschenberg moved his studio and primary residence to Captiva, Florida and began to travel extensively across Europe, the Americas and Asia. His Cardboards 1971-2 – a wry comment on the forces of globalisation – and his sumptuous fabric works such as The Jammers 1975-6 – inspired by his visit to the Indian textile centre of Ahmedabad – demonstrate his skilful play with unconventional materials. The epic project Rauschenberg Overseas Culture Interchange (ROCI), a travelling exhibition which took place between 1984 and 1991 taking in Chile, China, Cuba and Tibet, will also feature.

Performance and dance remained key interests for Robert Rauschenberg and will form a central strand of the exhibition, as will his interest in pushing the limits of image-making with new materials such as printing on translucent textiles, polished steel or oxydised copper. A striking group of late inkjet paintings, combining dozens of images taken at home and abroad through the use of digital technology, will reveal how he continued to innovate right into the twenty-first century.

Robert Rauschenberg is organised by Tate Modern and The Museum of Modern Art, New York. It is curated by Achim Borchardt-Hume, Director of Exhibitions, Tate Modern; and Leah Dickerman, The Marlene Hess Curator of Painting and Sculpture, The Museum of Modern Art, New York; with Catherine Wood, Senior Curator, International Art (Performance), Tate Modern; and Fiontán Moran and Juliette Rizzi, Assistant Curators, Tate Modern. 

The exhibition will travel to The Museum of Modern Art in New York and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 2017.

TATE MODERN
Bankside, London SE1 9TG
www.tate.org.uk

Richard Fleischner at Knoedler, NYC: Material /Process / Place: Works 1963-2011

Richard Fleischner

Material /Process / Place: Works 1963-2011 

Knoedler & Company, New York 

Throught April 30, 2011

RICHARD FLEISCHNER 

Untitled, 2004 

Gouache on paper, 17 x 16 3/4 inches

Courtesy KNOEDLER & COMPANY, New York

If a concept or idea is to be realized—not left in a conceptual form—the process that gives it its physical being becomes inseparable from its reading and therefore its meaning. My work grows out of the details that I recognize and acknowledge within the commonplace and universal. It is a practice that involves the juxtaposition and critical distancing between material interactions and placements. The understanding gained through working with different methods and materials—the crafting of glass, bronze, wood, wax and stone—is a part of a shared culture of labor that is irreplaceable to me. These interrelationships of intention, context and process and how they inform one another become the factors that are essential and irreducible in the elegantly refined forms that I most love. — Richard Fleischner, 2011

Knoedler & Company’s inaugural exhibition of the work of Richard Fleischner —RICHARD FLEISCHNER, MATERIAL / PROCESS / PLACE: WORKS 1963-2011, March 19 - April 30, 2011— is a survey spanning more than forty-five years, including works on paper, sculptures, and photographs, and focusing on a spectrum of unifying thematic currents and concerns that may be found in the artist’s work in all media, from his intimately scaled works to site-specific interventions and installations.

A critic once stated that Richard Fleischner “has seeded the country from coast coast with large-scale site-specific projects,” (Grace Glueck 2000) works that may be said to blur the boundaries between sculpture, architecture, and landscape. He figured, along with Alice Aycock, Michael Heizer, Richard Long, Mary Miss, Charles Simonds, Robert Smithson, and others, in two seminal exhibitions on site-specific art: Probing the Earth: Contemporary Land Projects (Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, 1977-1978) and Sitings (La Jolla Museum of Contemporary Art and traveling, 1986). 

Among Richard Fleischner’s permanent installations are: courtyard projects at MIT, Cambridge, Massachusetts (1980-1985 and 2008-2010) and the Dallas Museum of Art, Texas (1981-1983), Tufa Maze (1973), installed at Kykuit, the Rockefeller Estate, Pocantico Hills, New York; Sod Maze, originally created for the 1974 Monumenta exhibition, and permanently installed at Chateau-sur-Mer in Newport, Rhode Island; the Brown University War Memorial, Providence, Rhode Island (1996-1997); and the Marsh & McLennan Companies September 11, 2001 Memorial, New York (2002-2003). Most recently, he was commissioned to create a courtyard for the Baisillie School of International Affairs & The Centre for International Governance Innovation, in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada.

Richard Fleischner’s geometries do not exist as disembodied abstractions, but rather organize and bring to light the special eccentricities of a space, drawing forth and quietly illuminating its potentiality. His lines, planes, points, edges, angles, and axes derive not from his head, but from an extension of his personal and very physical interaction with the space. All his projects have involved plotting by plodding and acting out the measurements and arrangements. From the earliest interventions in the open fields, he has paced, reacted, sensed, visualized, and actually experienced rather than set down any a priori notion on paper. (Katy Kline 1983)

Richard Fleischner’s small-scale sculptures, some of which are closely related to his site-specific works, have been created in diverse media, including terra cotta, wax and wood, steel, and cast bronze and lead. Works from the artist’s series of Lead Drawings (1973-1975) are on loan for this exhibition from the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego.In his drawings and gouaches, Fleischner achieves a subtle fusion of figure and ground, articulating in two dimensions fundamental forms and geometries that have engaged him since the 1960s, including the relationships and balances of the human presence and perception within a field—what the artist has referred to as “critical distances.” One critic referred to his “Arcadian dreams of balance between self and world.” (Ken Johnson 1999) Applying layers of color to handmade paper with a palette knife, Fleischner sands, rubs, scrapes, washes, repaints and rewashes his gouaches to develop subtle tones and worn patinas rich in texture and incident, with the look of weathered masonry. On the surfaces, he often scratches rough, irregular grids, with incised white lines. In some of the graphite drawings, he includes solid figures in the form of rectangles or crosses that recall the geometrics of certain Russian Constructivists, like Malevich.

Richard Fleischner's photographs: the artist is perhaps least known for his work in photography, which he considers an entirely integral aspect of his oeuvre. Included in Material/Process/Place will be a series of photographs, the earliest of which, Checkers, is dated 1963. In 2007, the artist made a trip to Africa, and in 2008 traveled to India, and works from his Mali and Mumbai series are exhibited here for the first time.

On view in Knoedler Project Space: RAUSCHENBERG x 4, Throught April 30, 2011

Next Exhibitions at Knoedler: 

Conrad Marca-Relli: City to Town, May 5 - July 29, 2011. Catalogue with essay by Carter Ratcliff

Project Space: Keith Mayerson: Abstracts, May 7 - June 17, 2011

KNOEDLER & COMPANY

19 East 70th Street, New York, NY 10021

www.knoedlergallery.com

Artists Making Photographs at the Whitney Museum

Robert Rauschenberg (1925-2008), CY + RELICS—Rome, 1952.

Gelatin silver print, 14 15/16 x 14 15/16 in. (37.9 x 37.9 cm).

Whitney Museum of American Art, New York;

gift of the artist and Pace/MacGill Gallery 93.57.

© Robert Rauschenberg, licensed by VAGA, New York, N.Y.

Artists Making Photographs focuses on five major artists from the Whitney's collection – John Chamberlain, Robert Rauschenberg, Lucas Samaras, Ed Ruscha, and Andy Warhol – all of whom are best known for their work in sculpture and painting, although they have each made significant works with a camera as well. The exhibition, in the Sondra Gilman Gallery, opens January 16, 2009; it is organized by Elisabeth Sussman, Whitney curator and Sondra Gilman Curator of Photography.

The pioneer of the group is Robert Rauschenberg (1925-2008), who exhibited passionate interest in both painting and photography from the beginning of his career. He first studied photography at Black Mountain College in the early 1950s. In 1951 he stated that he would photograph the U.S. “inch by inch,” attesting to his investment in the medium. The following year he traveled to Rome, where he made numerous photographs, including one of fellow artist Cy Twombly, which is on view in the show. Rauschenberg’s large-scale black painting, with its multi-panel construction and textural ground of newspaper collage, provides further evidence of the artist's dedication to radical experimentation. Rauschenberg’s enthusiastic embrace of photography initiated a range of experiments over the next two decades.

Aware of Rauschenberg's work, Andy Warhol (1928-1987) explored photography in the mid-1960s. Warhol, however, sent his subjects into a photo booth rather than composing and taking their portraits himself. The process and aesthetic of mechanical reproduction would become integral to Warhol's work in the ensuing years, represented here by Nine Jackies with its repetition of appropriated photographic images of Jacqueline Kennedy taken at the time of her husband’s assassination. With this new style, Warhol initiated the genre of photo based history painting that continues to be explored by artists today.

The paintings and drawings of Ed Ruscha (b. 1937) similarly seize upon iconic images of American culture. With the recent discovery of his extensive body of photography, it now appears that Ruscha's ability to capture an image and create a mood derives, in part, from the focus provided by the experience of using a camera. The exhibition includes a sampling of the many themes that occur in his work across mediums. For instance, a self-portrait with a black eye finds poetic echoes not only in the “portrait”drawing of a familiar anti-nausea medication, but also in the medium of its execution: gunpowder.

John Chamberlain (b. 1927) and Lucas Samaras (b. 1936) are two artists who began to explore the possibilities of photography in the 1970s. Chamberlain’s abstract photograph of distorted planes of color recalls his welded sculpture of fragments of car parts. Samaras’s insertion of his body into decorative fields and his fluid manipulations of photographic emulsions parallel the surrealistic contortions of his laboriously crafted yarn and plaster chair.

Treasures of Modern Art: The Legacy of Phyllis Wattis at SFMOMA, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

Treasures of Modern Art: The Legacy of Phyllis Wattis at SFMOMA

San Francisco Museum of Modern Art 

January 30 - June 24, 2003

The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) presents Treasures of Modern Art: The Legacy of Phyllis Wattis at SFMOMA. This special exhibition highlights and celebrates works of art acquired by SFMOMA due to the vision and generosity of devoted trustee and patron, Phyllis Wattis, who passed away in June 2002 at the age of 97. The exhibition features more than 80 of her most important gifts—including works by Robert Rauschenberg, Piet Mondrian, René Magritte, Marcel Duchamp, Andy Warhol, and Barnett Newman, among others—offering a unique look at the lasting impact Phyllis Wattis had on SFMOMA. It focuses on works acquired between the years 1995 and 2002, the most significant period of Wattis’s philanthropic activity.  Treasures of Modern Art: The Legacy of Phyllis Wattis at SFMOMA is an exclusive SFMOMA presentation; the exhibition is co-organized by Madeleine Grynsztejn, the Elise S. Haas Senior Curator of Painting and Sculpture, and John S. Weber, the Leanne and George Roberts Curator of Education and Public Programs. 

Phyllis Wattis received national recognition late in life as her gifts of major works of contemporary and modern art helped transform the Museum’s permanent collection. Leading the way for SFMOMA’s unprecedented acquisition campaign of the late 1990s, Wattis worked closely with SFMOMA’s curatorial staff to acquire works that would have an immediate impact on the collection and its significance in the art world. Wattis keyed her donations to the collection’s gaps and needs, always asking the SFMOMA curatorial staff whether a proposed acquisition was of such importance that it could, in and of itself, spark a museum visit. In Phyllis Wattis’ words, taking a cue from the Michelin travel guides, she wanted to bring artworks to SFMOMA that would rank as “Four Stars, Worth a Detour.”

“SFMOMA owes a great debt to Phyllis Wattis. Her gifts have come to occupy key places in the art historical narrative the Museum presents,” states Madeleine Grynsztejn. “The caliber of the more than 80 works in this exhibition speaks to Mrs. Wattis’s belief that the Museum’s collection should be built around masterpieces and we’re excited by the opportunity to see them all together. Phyllis was one of those rare individuals whose vision made a difference to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and to the cultural life of San Francisco.”

The following are among the most significant works featured in the exhibition:

Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain, 1917/1964, one of the 20th century’s most iconic and controversial works of art, is a cornerstone of SFMOMA’s permanent collection. An edition produced in 1964 by the artist and the Milanese scholar/collector Arturo Schwartz from the destroyed 1917 original, Fountain is the first of Duchamp’s “ready-made” objects to enter the SFMOMA collection.

Red Liz, 1963 (also titled Liz No. 6), by Andy Warhol, is a classic early portrait of Elizabeth Taylor, painted in lavender, black and turquoise against a stunning red background. It is among the signature portraits Warhol created of such celebrities as Taylor, Jacqueline Kennedy and Marilyn Monroe. 

Les valeurs personelles (Personal Values), 1952, a painting from René Magritte’s mid-career, displays the signature style of the artist in one of his most extraordinary and refined images. Les valeurs personelles is one of the artist’s seminal works and includes many of the objects we associate with Magritte: the cloud-filled sky, the goblet, the box-like interior space with a crack in the ceiling. The painting creates the sensation that we are standing in an ambiguous space that is both open and confining, creating a sense of radical change in scale that represents one of the most potent aspects of Magritte’s works.

The donation of 14 iconic works by Robert Rauschenberg, purchased by Phyllis Wattis directly from the artist, made SFMOMA a destination point for lovers of postwar art. Included among those gifted are Erased de Kooning Drawing, 1953; Automobile Tire Print, 1953; and an accompanying group of key early paintings, sculptures and photographs. These works give SFMOMA an unmatched range and depth in Rauschenberg’s work. Phyllis Wattis developed a friendship with the artist during this period and they remained in contact until her death.

Phyllis Wattis: “The Patron Saint of San Francisco Arts”

Phyllis Cannon Wattis, a great granddaughter of Brigham Young, was born in 1905 in Salt Lake City, Utah. She was the daughter of a sugar company executive and the third of six children. Raised in Salt Lake City, she started college at the University of Utah and moved in 1927 to attend UC Berkeley, where she graduated with a degree in Economics. Following graduation, she returned to Salt Lake City and met Paul Wattis, whose father was a founder of the Utah Construction Company. They were married in 1934 and three years later moved to San Francisco, where they raised two children.

Phyllis Wattis became interested in art relatively late in life. Though she first visited SFMOMA in the 1940s, it wasn’t until 1964, while visiting the international art exhibition Documenta in Kassel, that her interest in modern art developed. 

In 1958 the couple established the Paul L. and Phyllis Wattis Foundation to formalize their philanthropic activities, which were aimed at educational, artistic and scientific Bay Area institutions. After 30 years, Phyllis Wattis dissolved the organization and promptly gave $26 million to several Bay Area institutions, including $5 million to SFMOMA’s New Building Campaign.

Phyllis Wattis served as a Trustee of SFMOMA beginning in 1973 and was elected a Lifetime Trustee in 1988.

Treasures of Modern Art: The Legacy of Phyllis Wattis at SFMOMA is organized by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

SAN FRANCISCO MUSEUM OF MODERN ART

www.sfmoma.org