Santa Monica

Robert Rauschenberg spun off some great graphic riffs at Gemini G.E.L. between 1967 and 1988. A two-gallery exhibition chronicles the artist’s varying approaches and the clarity or obscurity of his visual and mental games.

John Cage once likened Rauschenberg’s work to many TV sets all playing different stations at once, and lithographs from the ‘60s are all raffish reportage. In “Test Stone No. 2,” grainy black images of Charles Lindbergh, a military funeral and a vintage truck are overlaid with painterly marks and a footprint.

Forms of technology enter into works from the ‘70s like “Publicon Station V,” a box lit inside by a red light bulb. With wedges of red, white and blue metal, a bicycle wheel and snappy swatches of fabric, the piece has an brash, outgoing air.

Work generally gets larger and more vivid in the ‘80s, with a new fixation on fabrics in the “Samarkand” series and the subtle layering of illuminated translucent surfaces in the “Sling Shots Lit” series.

Every now and then, Rauschenberg chased down a wrong corridor. For a while, he seemed to fancy himself as a sort of second-rate Robert Motherwell, fashioning vacantly elegant arrangements of handmade paper. Very occasionally his methods seem too guileless, as in “Tibetan Locks,” a multiple wall relief from 1987 that contains only the big cadences of large color photographs.

But the sweep and extraordinary brilliance of this body of work cannot be denied. A generation of artists is indebted to Rauschenberg. (Manny Silverman Gallery, 800 N. La Cienega Blvd., and Fred Hoffman Gallery, 912 Colorado Ave., both to Oct. 14.)