About the Work
Even in the days when the triumph of strongly contrasting colours was being celebrated with his help through Pop Art, Robert Rauschenberg was cutting swathes of destruction in painting. He occupied it violently with traces of the wars in Vietnam and Cambodia, while also hinting at future crises. The Texan artist captured the rifts in urban structures with his camera in order to exploit them for the wild material collages of the 'Combine Paintings'. His series 'In + Out of City Limits' (1980/81) already focuses on the smoke of death surrounding the Twin Towers. However, the images prevent the viewer from looking into dilapidated houses, and beneath the Union Jack raised by his colleague Jasper Johns in honour of painting, Rauschenberg points out the one-way street leading to the next crash with the comment "ENOUGH IS ENOUGH". The artist transported the signs of downfall he had photographed on the facades of buildings back to his studio, where he transformed them into totem-like emblems of decline, either as subjects in paintings created in the style of Abstract Expressionism or sculpturally after the example of German Dadaists (Kurt Schwitters).
