Robert Rauschenberg: Combines will focus on the Combines created roughly between 1954 and 1964, the most important decade in the artist's career. The most complete survey of these works ever mounted, the exhibition will feature close to eighty key works drawn from major collections.Poetic and lush, the Combines present layers of complex and sometimes conflicting information. This prescient approach has become increasingly relevant in the current age of cascading information, when even the most groundbreaking artists are referencing and sampling disparate elements to create new forms. The Combines suggest the fragility of definitions, the fluidity of materials, and the complexity of forms that is characteristic of Rauschenberg's works. The artist's handling of materials provides a precise physical evolutionary link between the painterliness of Abstract Expressionism and iconographical, subject-driven qualities of early Pop Art. The book will constitute the most complete survey of the Combines ever presented, as well as the most rigorous analysis of their political, social, autobiographical, and aesthetic significance.