Robert Rauschenberg: A Celebration

August 5–November 6, 2025

Gallery 213
Free admission
Friends of Prints

Beginning in the 1950s, Robert Rauschenberg (1925–2008), through his conceptual work and large-scale collages (or “combines”), defined a new era of American art. A painter, photographer, printmaker, sculptor, and set designer, the artist challenged the traditional idea that artists stick to one medium or style. Rauschenberg pioneered a transfer drawing technique, in which he dissolved magazine and newspaper images with a solvent and transferred them by rubbing onto paper. He adapted this technique to canvas, printmaking, and three-dimensional works.

Celebrating the centennial of his birth, Robert Rauschenberg: A Celebration brings together 16 large-scale works on paper spanning 30 years of the artist’s career and includes a 16-foot-long screen-printed mirror from 1971, titled Star Quarters, featuring images of the constellations.

In 1961, Tatyana Grossman of Universal Limited Art Edition (ULAE), located on Long Island, introduced Rauschenberg to lithography. Tides, created in 1969, recycled his photographs of a hydrant and his turtle, “Rocky.” In 1967, the artist began working with Gemini G.E.L. in Los Angeles. With their assistance, Rauschenberg collaborated with artists and workshops internationally. For his early 1970s series Pages and Fuses, Gemini collaborated with the century-old Moulin à Papier Richard de Bas in Ambert, France, and the oldest paper mill in China in 1982. Rauschenberg’s Glacial Decoy series juxtaposed images from sets designed for choreographer Trisha Brown in 1979. In the 1990s, he focused on prints that utilized his photographs, as seen in Street Sounds from 1992.

Throughout his career, Rauschenberg’s ongoing creative enthusiasm for printmaking defied categories and upturned the definition of what was a print, inviting the viewer to find beauty in the unexpected.

This exhibition has an accessible pathway.