Robert Rauschenberg's 'Bicycloid' is a hybrid of a ready-made and a neon sculpture. His manufacturing method is extremely simple: he reproduces the contour of the vintage bicycle "Monark Silver King" with bright neon tubes and mounts the piece on an aluminum base. Rauschenberg deprived both the bicycle, a symbol of movement, and the neon tubes, an advertising tool, of their actual function, presenting it on a shiny silver plinth, he turned it into a work of art without any purpose. Rauschenberg's basic idea of integrating everyday objects into art goes back to the beginnings of his career, when he crossed boundaries between painting and object in his "Combines" as early as in the 1950s, by juxtaposing the most diverse elements, he had created new semantic contexts.
One of his main idols in this approach becomes quite obvious in the present work: Marcel Duchamp, who made history with his ready-mades at the beginning of the 20th century. In 1913, the French artist mounted a single wheel on a white lacquered kitchen chair, simply calling it "Bicycle Wheel", he paved the path for a new understanding of art. "Duchamp's life and work are a source of endless inspiration to me," says Rauschenberg about the inspiration for his work. "His Bicycle Wheel has always struck me as one of the most beautiful masterpieces of sculpture that I have ever seen." (Robert Rauschenberg, quoted from: L'Arte della Biciclette - da Duchamp a Rauschenberg, 2001, p. 82). However, as is so typical of his artistic approach, Rauschenberg does not stop at the classic ready-made, instead he transforms the industrial product of the bicycle into a "bicycloid" with neon lights, a new entity that paradoxically remains a bicycle while it has long left the realms of an everyday object.
With "Rocket / ROCI USA", he made the precursor for the "Bicycloids" series (1992-1994) as early as in 1990. Rauschenberg came up with the idea of the neon bicycle sculpture in context of the last Rauschenberg Overseas Culture Interchange exhibition, ROCI USA, at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. in 1991. In 1997, "Rocket" was exhibited as part of the artist's major retrospective at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York. One of his futuristic hybrid creatures is also said to have been in Rauschenberg's home in Captiva, Florida, as a photo by an unknown photographer suggests. The bicycle, often reduced to just the tire, also repeatedly finds its way into Rauschenberg's work outside of the "Bicycloids" series and is also a common feature of his ‘Combine’ paintings, screen prints, as well as his first work with neon lights, "Green Shirt" from 1967. The fact that Rauschenberg was not the only artist with a fascination with means of transportation was impressively demonstrated by the 2001 theme exhibition "L'arte della bicicletta" about the importance of the bicycle in art history, featuring works by Giacomo Balla, Michelangelo Pistoletto, Claes Oldenburg and Mimmo Rotella. "Bicycloid VII" was also among the exhibits. The Swiss gallery Jamileh Weber eventually sold it to its current owner, a German collector. This is the first time that one of Rauschenberg's rare neon bicycle sculptures is offered on the international auction market. [AR]