James Rosenquist - His American Life

James Rosenquist born in Grand Forks, North Dakota in 1933, was one of the most important American artists of the postwar era. He studied at the University of Minnesota and at his teacher’s suggestion applied and won a scholarship to the Art Students League in New York. In 1955, he left the Art Students League and eventually took a job painting billboards, often working on a scaffold high above Times Square.
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In the 1960s, Rosenquist transposed the visual language of commercial painting onto his canvases, filling his large-scale pictures with fragmented advertising imagery in bright colors. Rosenquist’s paintings of this era, such as the iconic F-111 (1964-65), are pictorial critiques of contemporary American culture, and he is considered a pioneer of the Pop art movement along with fellow artists Tom Wesselmann, Claes Oldenburg, Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein.

The work of James Rosenquist is represented in major private and public collections worldwide, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, Centre Georges Pompidou, Museum Ludwig in Cologne, Moderna Museet in Stockholm, and the Tate Modern in London. Aside from his many gallery and museum exhibitions, Rosenquist has had more than fifteen retrospectives, with two at the Whitney Museum of American Art. In 2003 the Guggenheim Museum organized a retrospective that traveled to Houston, New York, Bilbao and Wolfsburg. Most recently, he was the subject of the traveling retrospective James Rosenquist: Painting as Immersion at the Museum Ludwig in Cologne and the ARoS Aarhus Art Museum in Denmark from 2017-18.  His 2009 autobiography, Painting Below Zero: Notes on a Life in Art, is a best-seller.