02/28/2025
We are please to announce our participation this year at Palm Beach Modern & Contemporary Fair, Booth 310 !
Featured work:
Robert Rauschenberg (American 1925-2008)
Publicon Station I
Painted wood cabinet with fabric collage, plexiglass mirror, polish aluminum with gold-leaf paddle and electric light.
59 x 30 x 12 inches
1978
Publicons are a series of six wall-mounted sculptures Rauschenberg made “Related to the Stations of the Cross”, the Rauschenberg Foundation explains, “the Publicons are cabinets, each of which opens to reveal an enshrined object. The title merges ‘icon,’ a reference to medieval reliquaries and Renaissance altarpieces, and ‘public,’ since sculptures can be manipulated by the viewer.
In 1978, Leo Castelli showed Publicons at his gallery, and Leo Rubinfien had this to say in Artforum magazine about the exhibition:
“Robert Rauschenberg’s six “Publicons” begins as an inscrutable, blank white cabinet which unfolds, usually in several directions and very colorfully. The inside of each, where most of the work is, is a collage of patterned fabrics and utilitarian objects typical of Rauschenberg. Also typically, these items—an oar, a bicycle wheel, makeup mirrors on extendable brackets—appear in odd contexts or unusual colors, and hence become objects of irony.
The central device with which the “Publicons” work is the difference between their blank and unyielding exteriors and their exuberant contents. Since they are modeled on icon cases, a hint of the sacred still adheres to them, reinforced by their individual titles—Station 1, Station II, etc. Thus one approaches and opens them a little cautiously, to find a crazy Pop/Surreal confusion inside. They are, in fact, as much jack-in-the-box as icon. I think a good part of what the “Publicons” are about is this mockery of their own audience of culture-lovers. “
