Robert Rauschenberg

As Alison Nordström observes in her essay accompanying the exhibition, the presentation at Atlas Sztuki “is the first exhibition of this many works by Rauschenberg at a Polish institution, and the first to cover this period of his career. The absence of Rauschenberg and other stars of American art of the second half of the twentieth century from exhibitions in Poland is comparable to American ignorance of Polish art from the same period. The circumstances that produced this state of affairs on both sides may now be regarded as another form of reciprocal damage caused by the Cold War. It is truly significant that a body of work created in the 1980s as an initiative for international understanding can now be exhibited in Poland as evidence that such understanding is possible.”

As I have mentioned, Robert Rauschenberg is also a major figure on the international art scene. In her essay, Professor Maria Poprzęcka introduces this outstanding artist, who unfortunately remains too little known in Poland. Recalling that Rauschenberg became the first American in history to receive the Grand Prize for Painting at the Venice Biennale in 1964, she notes: “The American’s victory in Venice was taken as confirmation of the primacy of American art, although in both its artistic form and message that art had already moved far beyond the action painting that had triumphed little more than a decade earlier. Some French critics interpreted the jury’s verdict (the Polish member of the jury was Professor Juliusz Starzyński, director of the Institute of Art of the Polish Academy of Sciences) as a sign that Europe was about to be dominated by American artists, gallerists and critics — and by American capital. In today’s globalised art world, this conflict from half a century ago may seem obsolete; nevertheless, for many years it propelled numerous institutional and artistic initiatives intended to defend Europe’s cultural ascendancy from the threat of Americanisation.”

The exhibition at Atlas Sztuki presents thirty-seven photographs taken in different parts of the world. Alison Nordström has selected primarily images made by Robert Rauschenberg during the 1980s in Canada, Morocco, Japan, Thailand, Mexico, Cuba, Sri Lanka and, of course, the United States. As Dr Adam Mazur writes in his essay for the exhibition: “Robert Rauschenberg’s exhibition is being shown in Łódź — somewhere between Moscow and New York, between East and West. This changes things. It prompts us to ask what travel photographs brought home from journeys, used and processed by artists and documentarians, really are; what travelling exhibitions of Western masters are; what photographic festivals organised by Western curators are. In Poland — which is to say nowhere, as Alfred Jarry might have put it. Following the trail of Rauschenberg’s Łódź exhibition, we can discover an entire world of photographs that elude scholars usually focused either on a universal narrative (that is, one emphasising Anglo-French-German Western hegemony) or on a local one (that is, provincial, national and untranslatable). Extremes attract, but perhaps the time has finally come to look at what lies between them? To look at photographs made by visitors for us, the local inhabitants of the plain — though not the desert — stretching between East and West. Who exactly are these visitors?”

In one of Atlas Sztuki’s galleries, we will present works from the Soviet/American Array series, prepared for Rauschenberg’s 1989 exhibition in Moscow. It was the first exhibition by an American artist in the Soviet Union since the end of the Second World War. Moreover, the following year the Russians invited Robert Rauschenberg to exhibit in the Soviet pavilion at the Venice Biennale, making him the first artist to represent a country other than his own at the Biennale.

I encourage you to read the essays published in this catalogue, produced especially for the exhibition in Łódź. I hope they will introduce Polish audiences to Rauschenberg, an icon of American art. I would like to thank the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation for its constructive approach and excellent cooperation in preparing the exhibition.

The Robert Rauschenberg exhibition accompanies the fifteenth edition of Łódź’s Fotofestiwal. For Atlas Sztuki, this marks our fifth — and therefore jubilee — encounter with the festival.

I warmly invite you to encounter the work of Robert Rauschenberg.