Assemblage is three-dimensional artwork made from found objects and materials.
Assemblage is a technique in which three-dimensional artworks are created from found, everyday or non-art materials combined into a composition. It extends the Cubist practice of collage into three dimensions, and descends from Marcel Duchamp's readymades — the claim that ordinary manufactured objects could become art through selection and recontextualisation. Louise Nevelson built monumental assemblages from discarded wood — shelves filled with fragments of furniture, architectural elements, machine parts — painted monochrome to unify them. Robert Rauschenberg's 'Combines' mixed paintings with objects: a quilt, a pillow, a stuffed eagle, a goat through a tyre. Joseph Cornell's intimate boxes are perhaps the most poetic form: shadow boxes containing found objects — balls, glasses, maps, bird images — arranged into dream-like environments. Assemblage became the dominant sculptural mode of the 1950s–60s and remains central to contemporary art practice. The technique has roots in Picasso and Braque's early 20th-century collage and in Marcel Duchamp's 'readymades' — ordinary manufactured objects presented as art with minimal alteration — but assemblage proper, working fully in three dimensions with found and often discarded material, crystallized as a recognized category in the mid-20th century, given its name by Jean Dubuffet in the 1950s and formalized as an art-historical term by curator William Seitz's landmark 1961 MoMA exhibition 'The Art of Assemblage.' Robert Rauschenberg's 'Combines' — works that fused painting with three-dimensional objects, most famously a stuffed Angora goat encircled by a tire in 'Monogram' (1955–1959) — pushed the category toward pure sculptural hybridity, deliberately blurring the line between painting and object that Abstract Expressionism had kept relatively fixed. Louise Nevelson built entire monochrome wall-scale assemblages from salvaged wood scraps, arguing that discarded material carried its own accumulated history into the finished work. Assemblage's core idea — that meaning can be generated by the specific history and texture of real objects rather than by an artist's illusionistic skill — directly informs later installation art, appropriation art, and much of contemporary practice that incorporates consumer detritus, architectural salvage or personal ephemera, treating the found object's prior life as inseparable from its new one inside the artwork.