American artist Robert Rauschenberg died last Monday (May 12th) from heart failure at his home on Captiva Island, Florida, aged 82 .
Milton Ernst Rauschenberg, known as Robert Rauschenberg, was born in 1925 and came to prominence in the ’50s with a transition from the Abstract Expressionism movement to the to Pop Art.
The artist made his first solo exhibition at the Leo Castelli Gallery (New York) presenting a work named “Erased De Kooning" (1953) (literally), becaming internationally famous for his "Combines" of the 1950s in which objects and non-traditional materials were employed in innovative combinations, creating a kind a painting and a sculpture at the same time in a final three-dimensional collage.
In 1964 Rauschenberg was the first American artist to win the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale | 
