As would be typical of her practice, Rapoport, fresh from what she would later facetiously refer to as her "mid-career retrospective” at the Legion of Honor, San Francisco in 1963, began creating paintings that challenged mainstream assumptions about composition, form, materials, and process, combining multiple canvases into sculptural presentations.
Rapoport referred to these paintings as “combines,” a term associated with Robert Rauschenberg. Dean Wallace of the San Francisco Chronicle wrote that “by nailing two or more canvases together, (she) can tie together any number of seemingly unrelated ideas, textures, surfaces, and forms, and make them hang together as one solid, integrated form.”
Some of these works incorporated raw chunks of thickly painted abstract expressionist canvases, perhaps the aftermath of rapid disassembly, indicative of Rapoport's definitive break with the past.
The subject matter of this work is a clear departure from her earlier floral abstraction and figuration. Notably, these are the first works that incorporate the grid, and one painting (untitled, below) features a sine wave plot, a motif that would come to play a functional role in much later works such al as Biorhythm (1980-84). This represents Rapoport's first engagement with scientific imagery.
First exhibited at John Bolles Gallery in 1964 in an exhibition entitled "Contrasts," this work represents Rapoport’s break with painting techniques advocated by her mentors at UC Berkeley. Seemingly in reaction to this radical departure, the exhibition received mixed reviews, including a scathing takedown in Art Forum. However, Rapoport interpreted this criticism as a sign that she was on the right path, and would continue her experiments with her well-known Fabric Painting series.
Sonya Rapoport in the studio with I Love You (1963).
