Robert Rauschenberg: Sympathy for Abandoned Objects

The first survey of Robert Rauschenberg's sculpture in three decades, published for his centennial and organised around a single constraint: everything in it is scaled to the human body.

Gladstone Gallery mounted the exhibition at 530 West 21st Street in New York, 1 May to 14 June 2025, with the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, gathering more than thirty small floor and pedestal works made between the 1950s and the late 1990s from the Scatole Personali, the Elemental Sculptures, the Combines, the Kabal American Zephyr, the Gluts and ROCI, all of them assembled from found matter. The 168-page Swiss-bound volume, designed by Chris Svensson, carries an essay by Lisa Le Feuvre of the Holt/Smithson Foundation, entries on each series and detailed exhibition histories. The title is Rauschenberg's own phrase for the impulse that made him carry things home from the street.

Robert Rauschenberg (1925-2008) is remembered first for the Combines, which broke the line between painting and object in the mid-1950s, but he worked continuously in three dimensions from the Scatole Personali of 1952 onward; the last exhibition to treat that work on its own terms was at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth in 1995.