Robert Rauschenberg: The Use of Images at Fundación Juan March, Madrid (October 3, 2025 – January 18, 2026)

In February 1985, the Fundación Juan March organized the first solo exhibition of Robert Rauschenberg (Port Arthur, Texas, 1925−Captiva, Florida, 2008) in Spain. Forty years later, coinciding with the centenary of his birth and with the support of the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, this new show returns to the artist to reinterpret his entire oeuvre as an essentially photographic practice.

Rauschenberg began using the camera during his years at Black Mountain College, under the tutelage of Hazel Larsen and Aaron Siskind. In the 1950s, in his legendary Combines, he added newspaper clippings to the canvas by means of collage. Beginning in 1962, he used silkscreen to transfer images directly to canvas in his Silkscreen paintings. In both cases, these were photographs published in the press but, from 1983, he began to work mainly with snapshots taken by himself.

This appropriation of the images was extremely novel: on the one hand, it was accompanied by a singular development of artistic techniques and, on the other, the way he used them was based on a lack of hierarchy close to his concept of random order, which the artist reflected on in the early 1960s. The exhibition therefore emphasizes the key moments of his career that focus on this use: it begins with photographs from the early 1950s taken at Black Mountain College and ends with a series with autobiographical overtones entitled Ruminations, from 1999.