Overcast Ⅰ オーヴァーキャスト Ⅰ

After, his 1950s series of "combines," featuring canvases covered with pieces of trash and forceful strokes of paint, Rauschenberg started in 1962 to produce his "silkscreen paintings" in which images from newspapers, magazines, and photo-graphs he had taken himself were juxtaposed to create a collage with the use of silk-screening. It is believed that he was inspired by the contemporary work of Andy Warhol who had just invented this technique. In this work, an early example from this series, many images are constructed with seeming indifference into a composition dashed with brushstrokes of paint in the style of Abstract Expressionism. The combination of images representing technology and industry, such as rocket, steel plant, and a fist and those of dark ocean, and the mixed techniques of energetic brushwork and mechanical copying and repetition by silkscreen, seem to indicate that a contrast is intended between the artificial and the natural things. But the accumulation of diverse images that are reduced to monochrome also reminds us of the American society which has grown immense through absorbing everything.