Color lithograph on Arches paper
1968
85 x 62 cm. - 33 1/2 x 24 5/8 inches, full margins.
Edition of 96
Signed, titled, dated, and numbered in pencil, lower margin.
Printed by Mourlot, New York.
Published by Richard Feigen Graphics, New York, with the blind stamp lower margin.
Rosenquist, though he drew constantly on the technical image world as a source for motifs, expressed indifference to the internet and eschewed mechanical means of production, maintaining his faith in the human hand and its wondrous abilities as shown by the old masters in works, as he said, “made with minerals mixed in oil schmeared on cloth with hair from the back of a pig’s ear.” His early experience as a painter of billboards had taught him how traditional tools used in a new context and at a different scale afforded entirely new effects.
For him, the ancient tools retained infinite possibilities. Major Pop artist James Rosenquist used sign-painting techniques to make kaleidoscopic canvases that conjure American advertising. He embraced the visual language of commercial art, filtering images of shiny American objects through a cool, Surrealism-inflected lens. His paintings, murals, and prints evoke billboards and posters, yet they remain more mysterious and unresolved than any editorial campaign could allow. Rosenquist took art classes at the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, before moving to New York and briefly joining the Art Students League. He also worked as a billboard painter.
Rosenquist’s work has been shown in New York, London, Paris, Berlin, Tokyo, Rome, and Los Angeles, and belongs in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Centre Pompidou, the Museum of Modern Art, the Tate, the Guggenheim Museum, Moderna Museet, and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, among others.
His paintings have sold for up to seven figures at auction.
