Estate 1963

Robert Rauschenberg made this unnamed painting, "Estate," using screen printing and oil paint, probably sometime in the late 20th century. The image is fractured into different, almost collaged spaces, using what looks like a squeegee, smearing sections with big, gestural marks. It's a feast for the eyes, made through this amazing process of layering image on image. The texture is really what gets me going here, there are areas where the paint is thick and you can really see the brushstrokes, but there are other areas where the image is more faded and translucent. Take the smear of orange on the left, for example. It's both a chaotic mess, and also, somehow, controlled. Rauschenberg brings the mundane, like street signs, and the historical, like maybe some religious figure, into a conversation. This reminds me a little of Sigmar Polke, another artist who was playing with image and surface, and also thinking about the way that images circulate and get repeated in our culture. Ultimately, Rauschenberg embraces ambiguity here. There's no one right way to read this painting, and that's what makes it so exciting.