James Rosenquist
James Rosenquist (1933-2017), born in Grand Forks, North Dakota, moved to New York City in 1955, where he lived and worked for much of his career. One of the leading figures of American Pop Art, he drew on his experience as a commercial billboard painter to develop a distinctive visual language based on fragmented images from advertising, magazines and popular culture. Combining disparate motifs, dramatic shifts in scale and vivid colour, Rosenquist created enigmatic compositions that reflected the overwhelming visual landscape of consumer society. His work spans painting, collage, drawing and printmaking, with printmaking becoming an important part of his practice from the 1960s onward.
James Rosenquist
New Oxy
1964
Color lithograph on BFK Rives paper, with center fold (as published), 41 x 58 cm. From the signed deluxe edition of 100 (there was also an unsigned edition of 2,000).
James Rosenquist’s edition New Oxy (1964), created for the landmark print portfolio 1 Cent Life, transforms the familiar imagery of advertising into a dense, layered composition. Fragments of brightly coloured forms, handwritten notes and bold graphic shapes overlap across the double-page spread, while the large central “OXY” evokes the visual language of commercial packaging and branding. The work combines Rosenquist’s experience as a billboard painter with the spontaneous marks and textual elements associated with the emerging visual language of Pop Art. The result is a deliberately crowded image in which advertising, personal gesture and popular culture collide.
EUR 1,000
