Robert Rauschenberg: Art/Life (Cv/Visual Arts Research)

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Cv/VAR series no.176 reviews 'Jammers' by the celebrated American artist Robert Rauschenberg , in an exhibition held at Gagosian Gallery, Britannia Street London, from 16th February to 28th March 2013. The series comes from a month in 1975 when the artist worked in an Ashram in Ahmedabad, India. He continued to develop the loose fabric structures in New York, bringing reference to sails of crafts and the sense of free natural movement.

Born in Port Arthur, Texas in 1925 Rauschenberg attended Academie Julien and Black Mountain College, where he studied under Josef Albers. He worked with Jasper Johns and John Cage in the early 1950s, developing the famous 'combines', assemblages of found objects, and created the White and the Black paintings - presaging movements of Pop, Minimalist and Conceptual art of the following decades.

Includes an essay by James Cahill in which he surveys some of the recorded interviews Rauschenberg gave, and considers the wider function of artists’ statements. An interview by Nicholas James with David White, long time colleague and friend, now Senior Curator of the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, recalls the artist and his work.

Author James Cahill is a writer and artist based in London, and works at Sadie Coles HQ, a leading contemporary art gallery. He studied at Oxford University followed by the Courtauld Institute, where his research focused on British twentieth-century artists’ explorations of crucifixion and obscenity. In 2013 he was named runner-up in the inaugural Observer/Anthony Burgess Prize for Arts Journalism. He regularly contributes essays, interviews and reviews to a variety of art and culture publications. He is the co-author of an acclaimed monograph on British artist Angus Fairhurst, and has penned various catalogue essays including a new study of the work of French sculptor Etienne Viard . He leads an ongoing series of monthly art tours of restaurants in Mayfair, London, organised by Le Caprice Holdings, and has lectured at the Architectural Association on the paintings of Francis Bacon. His current research looks at the afterlife of ancient Greece and Rome in contemporary visual culture. In addition to his work as a writer, he is producing a series of paintings which explore the different modes and purposes of portraiture.