Images Leaking from the Street: Robert Rauschenberg and Crosstown at Galerie BASTIAN

An abandoned car tyre on a kerb, a crushed and rusted street sign, a worn bedspread, or a weathered barn door—for Robert Rauschenberg, the pictorial surface was never a sheltered precinct reserved solely for paint. His canvas operated as a porous membrane through which the detritus of the metropolis, fragments of personal memory, and the cacophony of an urban reality braided with fiction could directly seep.

With Crosstown, on view from 11 September to 21 November 2026, Galerie BASTIAN in Berlin revisits this radical legacy of an artist who fundamentally dismantled the orthodoxy of painting.

A Canvas Open to the Whole of Life

When Rauschenberg became the first American artist to win the International Grand Prize in Painting at the 1964 Venice Biennale, he did more than etch his name into art history; he thrust the brazen, restless energy of American contemporary art onto the world stage. Across more than half a century of prolific production, he disrupted conventional painterly formats under the mantra that “the whole of life is open to art,” never hesitating to court risk or force impossible materials into dialogue.

In his universe, there was no hierarchical divide between noble and mundane materials. He integrated oil on canvas with a taxidermied goat, a cockerel, or silkscreen printing—a technique he embraced alongside Andy Warhol in the summer of 1962. Noting that “the materials know that I am trying something with them,” Rauschenberg forged a distinct complicity with objects, steering the viewer away from a singular focal point toward an itinerant, roving gaze across the picture plane.

An Urban Prophecy: Crosstown

Anchoring the exhibition is his monumental 1997 work Crosstown, a formidable summation of this lifelong inquiry. Layered through vegetable dye transfers and specialized print processes, this sprawling urban panorama gathers photographic motifs, colours, and forms into a strictly non-hierarchical flow.

Viewed today, nearly three decades after its realization, Crosstown reads as a prescient urban allegory that anticipated the relentless deluge of images saturating our contemporary digital landscape: a surface where everything is interconnected, and dissolves the very instant it becomes visible.