Robert Rauschenberg: Booster and Seven Studies 1970

Robert Rauschenberg: Booster and Seven Studies 1970

Rauschenberg has been a key transliterator of the zeitgeist since the early 1960s, maybe even before. I love his ‘expanded prints’ of the 1970s, especially this life-size self portrait in x-rays. Like April Greiman’s full-size body scan of 1987, Rauschenberg’s image is made of several individual images collaged together, with annotations, sketches and notes appended to the image. I remember seeing his set of illustrations/interpretations of Dante’s Inferno at the Tate (or was it the Whitechapel?) in the mid-1960s, and being bowled over by the poetry of his simple use of solvent to make rubbings from commercially printed magazine images.

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