James Rosenquist: A Retrospective

On October 17, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York opened its first large James Rosenquist retrospective. With around 200 works, the exhibition offers the first comprehensive view of the artist's works. Deutsche Bank is not only sponsoring the exhibition; it has also lent a number of important exponents to the show.

"I'm interested in contemporary vision – the flicker of chrome, reflections, rapid associations, quick flashes of light. Bing-bang! I don't do anecdotes. I accumulate experiences." James Rosenquist

James Rosenquist, born 1933 in the Midwest, is considered to be one of the most important representatives of American Pop Art. He began his career as a sign painter on Times Square in New York. He already developed his own form of "New Realism" in the early sixties by dissecting motifs from ads and poster advertising, recombining them, and transferring them onto large-scale canvases. Yet Rosenquist's works never restricted themselves to transforming everyday subjects into art. His world of images is also accompanied by critical commentary.

In 1965, Rosenquist made his first environmental painting, F-111, following the invasion of American troops in Vietnam. It combines the fighter-bomber of the same name, a smiling girl sitting beneath a hairdryer, and the atomic fireball of a nuclear bomb in a vision of American culture that demonstrated the close kinship between euphoria and catastrophe to a shocked public. "Mr. Rosenquist, notwithstanding the enormous size of many of his paintings, is a Haiku master of the American psyche," wrote Michael Kimmelman in the New York Times following the exhibition opening.


James Rosenquist
Study for "The Swimmer in the Econo-mist", 1997
&DeutscheBank Collection, ©VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2003

Even though Rosenquist's oeuvre has already been documented in countless large exhibitions, James Rosenquist: A Retrospective is the first comprehensive presentation since 1972 that includes every technique the artist employed. Rosenquist applied a kind of artificial fog to his works to de-materialize the upper and lower edges of their pictorial space; he used hanging sheets of painted plastic to carry his collage technique into the third dimension. This technique enabled him to create puzzling and visionary pictorial compositions in which narrative and abstract structures become superimposed. Along with his paintings, which include President Elect (1960-61/1964), F-111 (1964-65) and Industrial Cottage (1977), the exhibition will also be showing a large number of his collages for the first time, which he made as preliminary studies. The collages provide insight into the development of his large-scale works; at the same time, they elucidate Rosenquist's painting technique.