| | James Rosenquist (born Grand Forks, North Dakota, USA,1933) is one of the most important American artists of the past fifty years. Best known as a leading figure within the Pop Art movement of the 1960s, alongside Warhol, Lichtenstein and Oldenburg, Rosenquist is a crucial figure in the development of post-war painting, who has influenced generations of artists including Ed Ruscha, Barbara Kruger and
younger artists, Kristin Baker and Kelley Walker. Since the 1960s, Rosenquist has continued to innovate, extending the range and forms of his work and embracing diverse themes including the environment, space travel and gun crime. This will be the first major solo exhibition of his work in London. It will occupy three venues,
and present over 50 paintings and collages, from the 1960s to unseen works from the present day, offering the first opportunity in the UK to examine in depth the work of this major American artist. It will also be a rare opportunity to see an installation of Rosenquist's very large-scale paintings including Joystick (2002), 5.2 x 14 metres, on display in Europe for the first time.
Rosenquist worked as a billboard painter from 1957-60, meeting and befriending at this time key figures such as Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg. His artistic breakthrough came in 1960 when he began to make paintings featuring people and products drawn from advertisements and magazine features. Using flat commercial techniques Rosenquist's paintings juxtapose fragments taken from popular culture to create disorientating, poetic and often disconcerting images. From an early stage Rosenquist's work was distinguished by the scale and complexity of its imagery. Perhaps his best known work remains the controversial F-111 1964-5 (currently on display at the Museum of Modern Art, New York). This massive painting, over 26 metres long, depicting a fighter plane, contains an extraordinary collision of imagery - the smiling head of a child seated beneath a hair dryer reminiscent of a missile nose-cone, an atomic explosion and writhing strands of spaghetti in tomato sauce and was painted as the US became involved in the conflict in Vietnam. It offers an oblique but powerful critique of the contradictory
forces which in Rosenquist's view threatened American society at the time. However, despite his political engagement Rosenquist has always stressed his formal painterly concerns. Since the 1970s Rosenquist's work has constantly evolved. He has used increasingly complex compositional strategies to explore diverse themes, from the state of the environment, to space exploration and relativity. His recent paintings speculate upon the possible visual effects of travelling at the speed of light.
In the UK, Rosenquist's work is widely known but has been little seen. While he is familiar as a key figure in Pop Art, and his early work has been seen here in survey exhibitions of that movement, there has never been an exhibition featuring work from throughout his career. This ambitious exhibition is spread over three venues.
The gallery at 23 Bruton Street will present a selection of paintings from the 1960s and 1970s, including classic Pop works such as 1947-1948-1950, 1960 and Coenties Slip Studio, 1961 (illustrated above). At Haunch of Venison Yard there will be an exhibition of works from the 1980s to the present, including a series of works that depict space and time, such as Time Points, 1991. There will also be a number
of new and recent works that present a critique of current American politics, including Pink Condition, 1996 (illustrated above), that point to the prevalence of guns in America, and The Xenophobic Movie Director, or Our Foreign Policy, 2004. At the Old Truman Brewery the very large-scale works and a selection of source collages, which reveal the complexity of his working process, will be displayed.
Rosenquist lives and works in Florida and New York. Since his first exhibition at the Green Gallery, New York in 1962 he has had numerous exhibitions around the world. Museum shows include the Kunsthalle, Cologne, 1972; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York 1972; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam 1973; MoMA, New York, 1990; and the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis 1993. In 2003-4 an acclaimed
retrospective exhibition toured from the Menil Collection and Museum of Fine Arts, Houston to the Solomon R Guggenheim Museum, New York, the Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao and the Kunstmuseum, Wolfsburg. Rosenquist's work is in important collections worldwide including MoMA, New York; the Pompidou Centre, Paris, and the Tate Modern, London where Silo, 1963-4 is currently on display. The exhibition will be accompanied by a major new publication.
For information and images please contact: Claire Walsh
Call +44 (0) 20 7936 1296 or email cwalsh@brunswickgroup.com
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