Robert Rauschenberg Florida Reservoir (Phantom), 1991

One of the most influential artists of the twentieth century, Robert Rauschenberg revolutionised the picture plane by bringing together painting, photography and sculpture in a highly inventive way. From the mid-1980s onwards, following his travels to Chile, he swapped canvas for metal sheets onto which he applied tarnishing agents that produced a chemical reaction on the surface. For the Phantom series, he experimented with mirrored, anodised aluminium, which repelled the tarnish to produce spectral images that appear or disappear according to one’s viewpoint.

Florida Reservoir (Phantom) evokes environmental concerns in the state ofFlorida, where Rauschenberg began living and working in 1970. The centrally placed fire hydrant links the image of gushing water both to the title and to the artist’s experimental wet-on-wet silkscreening process, so apparent in this work. He juxtaposes a palm tree – a sign of nature that has been co-opted to symbolise vacation spots and commercialism – with a power line in the image on the left, while the scattered bricks hint at the idea of a building. The fire hydrant and titular ‘reservoir’ further evoke the idea of the larger infrastructure of a city. The ghostly transfer imagery prompts the viewer to consider the invisibility of this infrastructure and, through their reflection in the picture’s surface, their own participation in urbanisation.