James Rosenquist
Painted billboards over Times Square, then made paintings that work the same way — too close to read.
James Rosenquist was born in North Dakota in 1933 and spent his early twenties painting billboards, including over Times Square, working on fragments of an image so large that from the scaffold he could never see what he was making. That is the whole method of the paintings: commercial imagery — spaghetti, a car grille, a face, a fighter jet — enlarged past legibility and spliced together. F-111, made in 1964 and eighty-six feet long, wraps a bomber around a room with hair dryers and tinned food. He kept working after a fire destroyed his Florida studio in 2009, and died in 2017.
The 1960s paintings lead the market by a wide margin. Scale is a practical constraint on who can buy: many of the major works are architectural and multi-panel, and separated panels are a serious problem — a complete work must retain all its parts and their correct order. Rosenquist was also a substantial printmaker, working with Universal Limited Art Editions and Graphicstudio in lithograph and screenprint, frequently at large size, and those editions are the accessible part of the output. Drawings and collage studies are numerous.
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