Rauschenberg Centennial. The Gluts, Quite a Story Review by Emmanuel Daydé
On the centenary of his birth, Robert Rauschenberg is being honored in numerous museums and institutions. In Paris, from October 20th to November 22nd, 2025, the Thaddaeus Ropac gallery is presenting his Gluts series (1986-1994) for the first time in France. Unique in many ways, his last and longest series of sculptures embodies his collaborations with avant-garde choreographers, including Trisha Brown, as this exhibition shows.
By Emmanuel Daydé
“We live in a time of excess where greed knows no bounds,” Robert Rauschenberg (1925-2008) angrily asserted in the mid-1980s. A famous son of Port Arthur, Texas, whose economy is centered on oil refining, the artist was commissioned to commemorate the 150th anniversary of the American state. In 1985, the man who said he had al- ways felt joy in his work, and even a renew- ed sense of happiness at the age of 60, rediscovered his native land in the midst of recession when he visited Houston. In the Southern States, the glut on the oil market had caused prices at the pump to plummet, leading to the abandonment and ransacking of gas stations. The grandiose landscapes of the West had been transformed into hostile wastelands littered with wrecked cars and rusty signs, as despairing as a Hopper painting.
Believing that “art has everything to do with life but nothing to do with art,” Rauschen- berg enjoyed working “in the space between art and life.” So he seized upon this desolation and sculpted it into metal bas-reliefs that were by turns heroic and ironic. Since 1954, he had been incorporating found ob- jects, or “gifts from the street,” into his Combines Paintings, he already had a whole series of works to his credit that reveled in disorder and adored matter, such as the Cardboards wall sculptures (1971-72) made from used cardboard boxes from his move to his new home in Captiva, a paradise is- land of seashells located in the Gulf of Mexico—or, according to Donald Trump, the Gulf of America [...]
