AMERICAN, b. 1933

James Rosenquist, one of the seminal figures of the Pop art movement, who took as his inspiration the subject and style of modern commercial culture. Through a complex layering of such motifs as Coca-Cola bottles, kitchen appliances, packaged foods, and women’s lipsticked mouths and manicured hands, Rosenquist’s large canvases and prints embody and comment on the dizzying omnipresence of the consumer world.

In the 1960’s Rosenquist transformed the visual language of commercial painting onto his canvases, filling his large-scale pictures with fragmented advertising imagery in bright Day-Glo colors. Rosenquist’s paintings of this era, such as the iconic F-111 (1965) in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, are pictorial critiques of contemporary American culture and he is considered a pioneer of the Pop Art movement along with fellow artists Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein. Rosenquist’s paintings since the 1970’s have retained his trademark aesthetic and focus primarily on geo-political, existential and environmental themes.

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