Robert Rauschenberg’s Untitled (1985) dates from the early years of the Rauschenberg Overseas Culture Interchange, the decade-long project he conceived and largely self-funded, touring four continents between 1984 and 1991. ROCI returned him to direct silkscreening, rarely used since the early 1960s, and began his experiments with metal supports.

Screened onto tin nearly five feet wide, the composition breaks in two. At left, black-and-white imagery: bathers on a stony shore, a llama standing among them, set against a mountainous horizon. At right the key changes and color pervades — a red hen strides amid swaths of blue and a lone yellow arc, the llama returns, and two photographs of Rauschenberg’s studio assistant Terry Van Brunt surface at the edges. Metal glints wherever the ink runs thin.

The hen is the same screen that repeats across Copperhead Chica / ROCI CHILE (1985) and Caryatid Cavalcade I / ROCI CHILE (1985), two of the copper paintings for ROCI CHILE, which opened in Santiago that year. The beach returns eight years later in Plum Beach (Urban Bourbon) (1993), now at the Rauschenberg Foundation. The National Gallery of Art holds another 1985 ROCI Chile painting, Copperhead Grande/ROCI CHILE, shown in its culminating 1991 ROCI exhibition.

Rauschenberg gave this painting to Van Brunt, who produced the videotapes shown throughout ROCI, as a birthday present. He trusted that “a one-to-one contact through art contains potent peaceful powers” — this painting, given to the person who helped make it, is that belief at its most direct.