JAMES ROSENQUIST

One of the most important painters of post-war American art, James Rosenquist established a reputation as a founding member of the Pop art generation, radically altering the face of graphic culture and the art world. Having sharpened his expert visual communication skills through early commercial and billboard work, Rosenquist came to prominence creating high-impact paintings charged with cultural commentary, examining themes from the social, scientific and political, to the romantic, cosmic and existential. His work was described by the late American curator Walter Hopps as “visual poetry.” Realized over the course of six decades, the work of James Rosenquist spans painting, sculpture, drawing, collage, and printmaking, and remains searingly immediate and relevant today. Pulsing with the political tenor of the 1960s, Rosenquist’s work began to critique a growing sense of mass consciousness pitched against the calamitous backdrop of the Vietnam War. Portraits of politicians collide with images of middle-class wealth and consumerism, asking us to question the impact of the dominant narratives encouraging dogmatic conformity in the U.S. Born in Grand Forks, North Dakota, Rosenquist studied painting at the University of Minnesota with Cameron Booth. In 1955, he moved to New York having won a scholarship to the Art Students League, where he studied with Will Barnet, Edwin Dickinson and Robert Beverly Hale, among others. In 1957, he took a job painting billboards, working on scaffolds in Brooklyn and, a year later, high above Times Square. By 1960, Rosenquist had stopped painting commercial advertisements and rented a small studio space in Lower Manhattan where his neighbors included artists Robert Indiana, Ellsworth Kelly, and Jack Youngerman. During this period, Rosenquist, working against the prevailing tide of Abstract Expressionism, developed his own brand of New Realism—a style soon to be called Pop art. Rosenquist’s first solo exhibition at the Green Gallery in 1962 sold out and, in 1965, after working a year on the painting, Rosenquist exhibited his iconic fifty-nine panel F-111 at Leo Castelli Gallery. The 86 foot-long work, one of Rosenquist’s most explicitly political, is now in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York. In the 1970s, after a move to south Florida, Rosenquist began an ongoing series inspired by the vibrant tropical flora surrounding his studio. This interest in ecology develops in the artist’s Water Planet series of the late 1980s that pushes further into new modes of abstraction and addresses the fragility of life on earth. These themes are fully-realized in his Speed of Light (2000) and his Multiverse series (2011), in which Rosenquist expands his visual language into the extraterrestrial to present themes of perception and non-objectivity. Curator Sarah Bancroft has described this instinct as such: “The artist’s grand and global narratives comment on the failures and foibles of humankind. Yet the very fierceness of these critical commentaries convey a sense of hopeful optimism about the survival of humans, their colonies, and social environments." In 2017, the Museum Ludwig, Cologne organized Rosenquist’s most recent retrospective, James Rosenquist: Painting as Immersion, which traveled to the ARoS Aarhus Art Museum, Denmark. He has also been the subject of major retrospectives at the Whitney Museum of American Art (1972) and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (2003-04). In 2022, Kasmin mounted a major solo exhibition of works realized between 1989 and 1992. In 2019, Kasmin staged Two Paintings, an exhibition of monumental work by James Rosenquist, reflecting his lifelong fascination with space, real and imagined. James Rosenquist’s work is included in major private and public collections worldwide, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York and Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, Spain; Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Tate Gallery, London; Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam; and Moderna Museet, Stockholm, among many others.