Robert Rauschenberg's Bird Watch, 1988 Frieze London

By Melanie Gerlis

Thaddaeus Ropac gallery brings a taster of a Robert Rauschenberg exhibition in Seoul to Frieze London next week. The large-scale Bird Watch (1988), from Rauschenberg’s foundation, will be offered at Frieze for $1.8mn and is one of the artist’s metal paintings inspired by visiting copper mines in Chile in 1984. The imposing image of a crane, silkscreened on to one of two copper panels that are joined by a bronze column, comes from Rauschenberg’s photograph taken in Chile.

The same image appears in one of his earlier Copperhead-Bites works, a series of 12 made for show in Chile and which mark the start of the artist’s explorations with metal. Eight of the Copperhead-Bites still belong to the foundation and will all go on show in the gallery’s Seoul space later in the year (November 3-December 23).