This fabulous ORIGINAL artwork is in very fine estate condition. It is signed and dated Rauschenberg 94 in the lower left. Fascinated with the idea of combining ancient and contemporary technologies, Rauschenberg returned to the use of encaustic in a 1994 series entitled "Shales". These paintings on canvas were made of brilliantly colored photo-transfers and expressive layers of wax. Photographs taken by Rauschenberg were translated into digitized images that were transferred with encaustic into a primed base layer of wax on canvas. The organic process of embedding and at times peeling off imagery in layers of molten wax evoked the laminated structure of shale. Exhibited in 1994, the SHALES series was praised as a return to the simplicity and directness of Rauschenberg's seminal collages of the 50's and the transfer paints of the 60's, and a resplendent indication of his protean facility with new ideas, techniques, and materials.  The Shales were made using a fire-wax technique developed by Donald Saff of Saff Tech Arts, Oxford, Maryland in which Rauschenberg's photographic images are transferred using encaustic to wax-covered canvases.  The clarity and depth of the wax medium creates a troupe l'oeil effect if the actual objects are suspended in wax.