James Rosenquist

In the early 1960s, James Rosenquist emerged as a leader of the Pop Art movement, employing the techniques of advertising illustration and the imagery of popular culture to provoke sharp questions about the nature of a society steeped in consumerism and mass-produced images. Through solid academic training and a long apprenticeship painting giant advertising billboards, Rosenquist mastered powerful techniques for rendering the bright, reflective surfaces of industrial products, and learned to work on a massive scale. Breaking with the dominant school of purely abstract painting, he deployed his formidable technical skills to render familiar objects and images in startling combinations. He gained international renown with monumental works, such as the painting F-111. Ten feet high and 86 feet wide, it interspersed images of a jet fighter plane and a mushroom cloud with those of a tire tread, light bulbs, an umbrella, a child's head in a gleaming domed hair dryer, and a tangled mass of spaghetti in red sauce. In the sixth decade of an enormously productive career, James Rosenquist's work continues to astonish with its brilliance, playful humor and unflagging invention. His unique, original vision has transformed our perception of the world around us.