ROBERT RAUSCHENBERG: GLUTS

THADDAEUS ROPAC presents an exhibition of Robert Rauschenberg’s works, who revolutionised the picture plane through the inclusion of everyday objects, which he termed ‘gifts from the street’, redefining and expanding the boundaries of what could be considered an artwork. It was in this spirit that he created his Glut series of sculptural assemblages at the end of the 1980s and the beginning of the 1990s.

October 20, 2025—January 17, 2026

The Gluts represent one of Rauschenberg’s earliest forays into a new material – metal – in the form of found objects assembled and riveted together to create wall reliefs and freestanding sculptures. Unlike in the artist’s earlier Combines, however, the found elements in the Gluts are no longer affixed to canvas supports. Instead, they become entirely autonomous, placed directly on the wall or the ground in a wholehearted engagement with the poetics of recycling and reclamation.

The series was inspired by the artist’s 1985 visit to his native Texas, which was in the midst of a recession due to a surplus, or ‘glut’, in the oil market, turning its landscape into a wasteland of abandoned vehicles and the rusting signs of failed petrol stations. Returning to his studio in Captiva Island, Florida, Rauschenberg, marked by what he had seen in Texas, sought out similar objects in the local scrapyard, salvaging discarded signs and automotive and industrial parts to create the first Gluts: a gesture that anticipated the environmental concerns that, decades later, have taken a central position in artistic thought and production.

As Brown recalled: ‘Bob and his team dumped a truckload of junk backstage and proceeded to sort, stack, drill, and grommet into the night.’ He later incorporated pieces from this stage set into the Glut series, referring to them as the Neapolitan Gluts. This exhibition presents several examples of the Neapolitan Glut series alongside the Gluts made in Captiva Island.

At first glance the viewer finds in the Gluts an elegant formal abstraction; with a second look, what Mark Alizart calls ‘the appearance of function’ in his essay in the catalogue accompanying the exhibition. Rauschenberg enjoyed wordplay, and his titles often simultaneously indicate potential readings of his works and wittily exploit the ambiguities of the terms he uses. In Balcone Glut (Neapolitan) (1987), a ladder projects through the opening in a ventilation duct to imply the titular ‘balcony’; the alternating joist-like metal strands and transparences of Greenhouse Glut (Neapolitan) (1987) suggest the botanical structure.

But more than this, there is a sense of anthropomorphism across the Gluts, where the coldest, hardest of materials is animated with details that play on our pareidolia to suggest dangling legs or eyes. ‘The most striking thing’ writes Alizart of the Gluts, ‘is that they all seem to swarm with life. Rauschenberg doesn’t merely give his detritus a ‘second life’ in the sense of a ‘second chance’; he genuinely transforms it into an organism.’ For Alizart, Greek Toy Glut (Neopolitan), becomes a shield-wielding hero from The Iliad; it might also be read as a constructed Trojan horse with a bowed head.

When making the Gluts, Rauschenberg almost always left the painted finishes of his found metals untouched in the final work, instead giving prominence to each metal component’s inherent dents, markings, and colouration. Carnival (Glut) (1986) is a rare exception to this: he painted its inner face a shadowy pale pink, marking an unusual apparition of the artist’s own paintbrush in the Gluts.

The Gluts, Davidson adds, represent ‘an extremely mature and confident body of work, personal exercises or amusements for Rauschenberg, where the whole becomes more than the sum of its parts.’ These futuristic constructions made from the detritus of a society in which industrialisation has begun to eat itself alive, unexpectedly, call for ‘a more human world, not less’; ‘ultimately’, as Alizart continues, ‘the logical consequence of a philosophy that associates art and life’.

I think of the Gluts as souvenirs without nostalgia. What they are really meant to do is give people an experience of looking at everything in terms of what its many possibilities might be. — Robert Rauschenberg.

Rauschenberg’s photographs not only provided source material for his experimental multimedia works, but also constituted artworks per se. The photographs in the exhibition exemplify the ‘vernacular glance’ that art critic Brian O’Doherty discerned in Rauschenberg’s photographic oeuvre. The half-dismantled vehicles and industrial landscapes pictured, meanwhile, foretell the content of the sculptural Gluts.

As Rosalind Krauss describes, Rauschenberg’s ‘fascination with two-dimensional “fronts” (billboards, torn posters, shop windows) stan[d] in for the deep space of the “real”, which they effectively block.’ This same fascination is carried across into the artist’s painterly and sculptural work.