James Rosenquist

James Rosenquist was born in Grand Forks, North Dakota, in 1933 and died in 2017 in New York City.  He moved frequently throughout the Midwest with his parents, who shared with him their interest in airplanes and mechanics.  He began taking art classes in junior high school.  He earned his B.A. from the University of Minnesota in 1948 and studied painting under Cameron Booth.  In the summer, he painted signs and bulk storage tanks in Iowa, Wisconsin, and North Dakota.  In 1954 Rosenquist painted his first billboard, and a year later, on scholarship to the Art Students’ League in New York; he studied with Edwin Dickinson, Will Barnet, Morris Kantor, George Grosz, and Vaclav Vytacil and shared a studio with Robert Indiana, Robert Rauschenberg, and others.  In 1957 he joined the sign painters’ union, and in 1958 he went to work painting billboards for ArtKraft Strauss Company and creating window displays for Bonwit Teller and Tiffany & Company.  Two years later he had saved up enough money to paint full-time in his studio in Coenties Slip near the East River in Manhattan.  He progressed from Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art to exploring the application of commercial materials and techniques in his painting.  The resulting montagelike compositions of deliberately fragmented images from popular culture quickly became his signature.  He sold out his first solo exhibition at the Green Gallery in New York in 1962.  The first of his truly colossal paintings, F-111, a visual digest of mid-1960s conflict, cemented his reputation.  Major exhibitions of his work have been held at the Museo d’Arte Moderna in Turin, the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa, the Wallraf-Richartz Museum in Cologne, the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, the National Gallery of Victoria, Australia, the Denver Art Museum, and the National Museum of American Art, Washington, D.C.  Beginning in the early 1960s Rosenquist was also actively involved with printmaking workshops, and numerous exhibitions have been devoted to his graphic production.  The visceral imagery of his mature style, with its jarring juxtapositions of cropped close-ups of figures and representations of consumer and industrial products, speaks to the changing fabric of American society.

*Excerpted from Tools as Art: The Hechinger Collection, published by Harry N. Abrams Inc. Edited to reflect the artist’s passing

www.jimrosenquist-artist.com/