Robert Rauschenberg - Contemporary Evening Sale London Sunday, July 5, 2009 | Phillips

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  • Provenance

    Pace Wildenstein, New York

  • Exhibited

    Raleigh, North Carolina, City Gallery of Contemporary Art, Robert Rauschenberg 1974-1991: Animals and Other Themes, 14 September - 27 October, 1991; Basel, Galerie Beyeler, 18 March - 13 May, 1995; Charlottenlund, Denmark, Ordrupgaard Samlingen, 14 October - 10 December, 1995; Robert Rauschenberg: Night Shades and Urban Bourbons 

  • Literature

    Exhibition catalogue, City Gallery of Contemporary Art,  Robert Rauschenberg 1974-1991: Animals and Other Themes, Raleigh, 1991, n.p. (illustrated); Exhibition catalogue, Galerie Beyeler, Robert Rauschenberg: Night Shades and Urban Bourbons, Basel, 1995, n.p.

  • Catalogue Essay

    Although technically belonging to his Urban Bourbon series, Robert Rauschenberg's expressive 1991 painting entitled Wolf Wood displays many of the hallmarks of his Night Shades series. Executed on metal, the works in these two series were produced in tandem roughly spanning the decade between the mid 80s and mid 90s.The present lot powerfully incorporates two of Robert Rauschenberg's signature techniques, silkscreened photography and gestural painting or ‘free-painting' as the artist preferred to call it. In fact, Wolf Wood is a tour de force where Rauschenberg, who hesitated between becoming a painter or a photographer, reconciles the two disciplines.The artist has silkscreened over a sheet of enamelled aluminium a series of black and white photographs culled from his personal archive. His two beloved Samoyed dogs beautifully frame a poetic close-up of a leafy branch.The powerful vertical composition is then broken up by splashes of pure white acrylic paint applied by the flick of the brush.The incredibly subtle, varied and intentional shading from light grey to dense black lend the work a three dimensional quality.The painting comes alive when viewed from different angles with light striking different sections of the reflective metalic surface. Like a hallucination, the dark outline of a tree appears out of the upper left quadrant of the composition after prolonged viewing.
     

16

Wolf Wood (Urban Bourbon series)

1991
Acrylic and silkscreen inks on enamelled aluminium.
247 x 125.5 cm. (97 ¼ x 49 in).
Signed and dated 'Rauschenberg 91' lower left.

Estimate
£250,000 - 350,000 

Sold for £289,250

Contemporary Evening Sale

29 June 2009, 7pm
London