James Rosenquist

James Rosenquist, born in 1933, American painter and printmaker, one of the leading artists in the movement known as pop art. Rosenquist is noted for paintings of images derived from mass media and advertising which are then spliced together in often incongruous ways and presented in huge close-ups.

Born in Grand Forks, North Dakota, Rosenquist studied art at the Minneapolis School of Art in 1948, at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis from 1953 to 1954, and at the Art Students League in New York City from 1955 to 1956. Both in Minnesota and later in New York, he was employed as a sign painter and worked on enormous displays, including billboards in New York City's Times Square area.

Rosenquist began applying the techniques of commercial painting to his own art in the early 1950s, creating a niche for himself as one of the leading artists in the pop movement, along with Americans Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, and Tom Wesselmann. Employing the garish colors often used in advertising, Rosenquist juxtaposed seemingly unrelated images derived from commercial sources. For example, in I Love You with My Ford (1961, Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Sweden), a field of greatly magnified spaghetti shares space on a large canvas with the images of a Ford automobile and a woman whispering to a man. In some paintings, Rosenquist begins to address political issues, but any intended statement becomes lost in a jumble of mismatched images. F-111 (1965, Museum of Modern Art, New York City) features the image of a fighter plane alongside pictures of banal consumer products and scenes of destruction. It is more than 26 m (86 ft) long, wraps around four walls, and includes reflective aluminum panels to incorporate the viewer's own image into the work.

In the late 1970s Rosenquist began painting sharp slivers of images woven together, such as Star Thief (1980, private collection), in which a picture of a woman's head is cut into strips and interspersed with colored wires. Rosenquist also has created large works combining techniques of lithography, screenprinting, etching, and collage. One such piece, the 10.7-m (35-ft) long Time Dust (1992, Tyler Graphics, Mount Kisco, New York) features a pop can and a French horn that seem to float in space.