Sympathy for Abandoned Objects
May 1 — June 14, 2025
New York: 21st Street
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.
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Robert Rauschenberg (1925–2008) was an American artist whose radically experimental approach to materials, images, and artistic disciplines helped reshape postwar art. Working across painting, sculpture, photography, printmaking, performance, and technology over the course of a six-decade career, Rauschenberg resisted identification with any single movement or medium. Instead, his expansive practice was guided by a desire to work in what he called the “gap between art and life,” continually challenging distinctions between artistic genres and the everyday world.
Experimentation was fundamental to Rauschenberg’s approach. From the assemblages of found and discarded materials that characterized his celebrated Combines (1954–64) to later works incorporating photography, fabric, metal, and technological processes, he continually expanded the possibilities of recognizable objects and images through acts of juxtaposition and transformation. Everyday objects, industrial detritus, organic materials, and mass-media imagery became part of an evolving visual language that moved fluidly between abstraction and representation, two and three dimensions, and individual artistic practice and collaboration.
Rauschenberg’s commitment to exchange extended beyond his studio practice. Throughout his career, he collaborated with artists, performers, writers, artisans, and engineers and advocated for the wider creative community. In 1970, he founded Change, Inc., a nonprofit providing emergency assistance to artists, and from 1984 to 1991 personally funded the Rauschenberg Overseas Culture Interchange (ROCI), traveling to ten countries to foster cross-cultural dialogue through art. His lifelong spirit of experimentation, collaboration, and engagement continues to resonate across contemporary art.
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