at LACMA (through June 9, 2019)
Reviewed by Nancy Kay Turner
“Every act of creation is first of all an act of destruction”
–Pablo Picasso
“There is no reason not to consider the world as one gigantic painting”
–Robert Rauschenberg
Run, don’t walk to see the revelatory exhibition entitled Rauschenberg: The ¼ Mile, at LACMA. The large-scale, enormously ambitious work shown here (together for the first time) as one long piece was done over seventeen years and is a joyful trip through Rauschenberg’s absolutely pristine craftsmanship, complex imagery and his many cultural touchstones. These works were started in 1981 when there was a Rauschenberg retrospective in Europe and clearly the artist is ruminating on his previous bodies of work such as his iconoclastic “Combines” from the fifties and sixties and his “Spreads” series from 1975-83. [Read more…]