"Rauschenberg Express" Hosted by the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum
Madrid, Spain - Opening on 7 November at the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum is the 20th in the Museum’s “Contexts of the Permanent Collection” series. Entitled Rauschenberg. Express, it is the first exhibition organized by the Museum to be devoted to a living artist. The exhibition aims to document and reveal the process through which the American artist Robert Rauschenberg arrived at the technique of oil painting with ink serigraphy – one of his most important innovations – and the way this became the principal element of his style around 1963, the year that Express was painted.
Alongside this painting, the exhibition brings together a total of 16 works: another six oils with serigraphy executed in 1962 and 1963, a selection of eight Cantos from the series of 34 illustrations to Dante’s Inferno, and a work on paper. The intention, as with all the Contexts exhibitions, is to offer an in-depth study of a work from the Museum’s collection. This group thus establishes a context for Express while also analyzing the invention of the transfer technique that Rauschenberg started to develop in 1958 and which allowed him from that point onwards to combine traditional, gestural painting with photographic images.
Robert Rauschenberg (born Port Arthur, Texas, 1925) is a multidisciplinary artist, working in photography, painting and print-making. Rauschenberg is highly prolific and innovative, consistently manifesting a desire to experiment and a critical attitude to the established norms of whatever genre he is working in. His ongoing search for new forms of expression in art made Rauschenberg one of the most influential names for young artists in the last decades of the 20th century.
Between 1946 and 1947 Rauschenberg studied art history, sculpture and music at the Kansas City Art Institute and shortly afterwards entered the Julian Academy in Paris. He was also a pupil of Josef Albers and Jack Tworkov at the prestigious Black Mountain College in North Carolina. His time at that multidisciplinary institution undoubtedly helped him to formulate his own distinctive artistic language. At Black Mountain College Rauschenberg was a fellow pupil of the choreographer Merce Cunningham and the musician John Cage, collaborating with both from then onwards. 
During this period Rauschenberg worked for a time as a shop window dresser for Bonwit Teller and Tiffany, while in 1951 he held his first solo exhibit.
The result of Rauschenberg’s friendship with Jasper Johns from 1954 to 1962 was a collaboration that resulted in artistic experimentation outside the prevailing field of Abstract Expressionism. Nonetheless, Rauschenberg always maintained various elements from this trend in his work even while rebelling against it, and never aimed to depart entirely from figuration. In fact, combining both tendencies took a decade of analysis and experimentation. Johns and Rauschenberg acted as the link between the generation of the oldest Abstract Expressionist artists and the young Pop artists.
Visit the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum at : www.museothyssen.org