Robert Rauschenberg

(Port Arthur/Texas 1925–2008 Captiva Island/Florida)
Tower Terrain (Spread), 1978, on all four parts signed, dated, titled and inscribed on the reverse Rauschenberg 78, solvent transfer and fabric on plywood with clear and colored mirrors, oar and wood wheels, consisting of 4 joined parts, 186 x 286 x 15 cm, perspex frame (209 x 310 x 27 cm)
The work is registered with the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, New York, under the number RR78.022.

Provenance:
Ace Gallery, Venice
R. Weiss, Chicago
Sale Sotheby's, New York, October 7, 1987, lot 108
Glabman Ring Gallery, Los Angeles (label)
Private Collection, Switzerland (May 2000)
Private Collection, Zurich
Sale Galerie Kornfeld, Bern, June 19, 2015, lot 146
Private Collection, Germany (acquired at the above sale)

Exhibited:
Vancouver, Art Gallery, Robert Rauschenberg. Works from Captiva, September 8 - October 29, 1978, exhib. cat. Vancouver 1978, with full page col.-ill.

Robert Rauschenberg fundamentally expanded the concept of art from the 1950s onwards, consistently breaking boundaries and, through an enduring spirit of experimentation, repeatedly generating radically new forms. As an artist whose work forges a link between Abstract Expressionism and the emergent Pop Art of the 1960s, Rauschenberg brought the external world into the once sacral space of the gallery. A child of Dadaism, he was influenced by the assemblages of Kurt Schwitters, whose example led him to conceive of art and life as one. Nevertheless, Rauschenberg’s work drew its inspiration from contemporary America. In the post-war period he revolutionised the pictorial field with his hybrid painting-sculptures by incorporating everyday objects, such as tyres, doors, ironing boards, light bulbs, fans, or even parachutes, which he himself described as “gifts from the street”.

In the mid-1970s, following his move to Captiva, Florida, and extensive travels in France, Israel, and India, Rauschenberg produced the “Spreads” (1975–1982), a series of large-scale sculptural works, some extending over five metres in width. The series marks his triumphant return to the scale and complexity of his earlier “Combines”, uniting objects from the real world with a symphonic variety of imagery. In doing so, it establishes new relationships between his solvent-transfer technique, executed on vividly coloured lengths of fabric, and their real-world sources.

“Tower Terrain (Spread)” illustrates Rauschenberg’s skilful synthesis of various distinctive facets of his work – including the use of appropriated imagery, found objects and the solvent-transfer method he developed – in a large-scale realisation. As a typical example of the “Spread” series, “Tower Terrain (Spread)” consists of a plywood panel partially covered with fabric or acrylic mirrors. In this work, Rauschenberg combines motifs from cultural and natural landscapes, and from specific events he had discovered in magazines, surrounding them with three-dimensional objects. In his choice of titles, Rauschenberg employed linguistic ambiguities, thereby encouraging both literal and metaphorical interpretations of the visual language in his artwork.

The ‘tower’ tops of individual skyscrapers, piercing through the fog, meet the boulevard canyons of the metropolises and finally plunge into the depths of the sea. All three photographs are from the March 1978 issue of The National Geographic. Other images show trees or mountains. Everything is wide open, everything is in motion.

For the artist, the term Spread signifies: “as far as I can make it stretch, and land (like a farmer’s ‘spread’), and also the stuff you put on toast.” For the art historian Thomas B. Hess, these works are “like arias in a language you don’t know, but which you can understand perfectly because of the precision of the singer’s gestures…and above all, because of the music itself”
(Thomas Hess, Art Replenishing Rauschenberg, in New York Magazine, May 16, 1977, pp. 79-80).
(Information: Rauschenberg Foundation, April 2026)