Robert Rauschenberg Untitled, 1984

I know how to describe this kind of color - delicious! It's like movie candy. It's so glamorous - every color is trying to be a star. — Robert Rauschenberg, 1963

Fabric-laminated paper serves as a substantial support for this large-scale, screen- printed painting. Created in 1984, it belongs to a group of works executed between the mid-1980s and the mid-1990s on a mounted, pretreated canvas-like surface that represents one of the artist's last instances of working on canvas, rather than metal or polylaminate supports. Images cropped from the artist's own black-and-white photographs are articulated in bold, solid hues achieved through a silkscreening process that allowed Rauschenberg to achieve colours he described as 'delicious' and 'like movie candy'. The imagery reflects the artist's travels across the world and are arranged within an irregular rectilinear structure, described by art historian Nan Rosenthal as a 'syncopated grid'. The asymmetrical grid emphasises a sense of perpendicularity even while the misalignment of the coloured blocks, varied imagery and handpainted mark-making assert the work's unique compositional dynamism.