Robert Rauschenberg's Untitled (1985) dates from the early years of the Rauschenberg Overseas Culture Interchange, the decade-long touring project he conceived and largely self-funded, carrying his work across four continents between 1984 and 1991. ROCI returned him to direct silkscreening as a primary painting technique, rarely used since the early 1960s, and began the metal-support experiments he pursued into the 1990s.

Screened onto tin nearly five feet wide, the composition breaks in two. At left, a black-and-white beach: bathers scattered across a stony shore, a dog, a gull, the figures reversed to pale ghosts beneath an empty sky. At right the key changes abruptly — a red rooster strides over bands of blue and a lone yellow arc, and two photographs of the artist as a young man surface at the edges, one sharp in blue, one blurred. Metal glints through wherever the ink runs thin.

Rauschenberg reused this beach photograph eight years later in Plum Beach (Urban Bourbon) (1993), now held by the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation. The National Gallery of Art holds Copperhead Grande/ROCI CHILE (1985), shown when the museum mounted the culminating ROCI exhibition in 1991. Rauschenberg trusted that "a one-to-one contact through art contains potent peaceful powers" — here that conviction is worked out on a single sheet of metal.