James Rosenquist Fine Arts Prints 1968 to 1982
All prints are available for sale
David Lawrence Gallery
http://www.printed-editions.com/gallery/david-lawrence-gallery
(310) 666-5858 thedlgla@gmail.com P.O. Box 3702 Beverly Hills, CA. 9021
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JAMES ROSENQUIST
James Rosenquist by Andy Warhol
JAMES ROSENQUIST- AN AMERICAN ICON
James Rosenquist is an internationally renowned artist who first achieved wide recognition as a result of his pioneering contributions to Pop Art in the 1960s and 1970s. Like many artists of his circle, particularly Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein, Rosenquist has been fascinated with the visual language and ephemera of mass-reproduction. In Rosenquist's case, his interest was manifested in an art derived from popular imagery sources yet committed to the expression of his personal concerns as an artist and a printmaker. He has tested the limits of the print medium in order to achieve, on the one hand, subtle nuances unique to particular techniques, and, on the other, the vast billboard scale that is his signature style.
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James Rosenquist, (born November 29, 1933, Grand Forks, North Dakota, U.S.), one of the seminal figures of the Pop art movement, who took as his inspiration the subject and style of modern commercial culture. Through a complex layering of such motifs as Coca-Cola bottles, kitchen appliances, packaged foods, and women’s lipsticked mouths and manicured hands, Rosenquist’s large canvases and prints embody and comment on the dizzying omnipresence of the consumer world. Rosenquist grew up in North Dakota and Minnesota, and at age 14 he won a scholarship to study at the Minneapolis School of Art (now the Minneapolis College of Art and Design). He continued art studies at the University of Minnesota from 1952 to 1954. In 1955, having received a scholarship to the Art Students League, he moved to New York City. All the while, Rosenquist supported himself by working as a billboard painter, later using the leftover billboard paint to create small abstract paintings in the manner of the reigning New York school style. It was not until 1960 that he abandoned Abstract Expressionism to directly engage the techniques and iconography of his commercial work.
Rosenquist enjoyed the effect of using a billboard style of painting on smaller canvases, where the images became softly blurred and their literal quality was lost in the close-up orientation and the cropping of the image. He also played with shifts in scale and technique—employing, for example, grisaille and full colour— and juxtaposed a number of disparate motifs in a single canvas. The completed painting would be a disjunctive display of various pop images that presaged the postmodern strategy of pastiche. Rosenquist’s array of signs sometimes suggested an overriding sexual or political theme. In the 1960s he made more overtly political work, epitomized by the monumental wraparound painting F111 (1965), a canvas in 51 pieces that places American goods against the backdrop of a military fighter-bomber. Curator Constance W.Glen the author and curator of “Time Dust, , Rosenquist, Complete Graphics: 1962-1992”, states in the forward to the exhibition catalog, “Thought of first and foremost as a painter whose work was most persuasive and most succulent on the commanding scale of a Time Square billboard, James Rosenquist has come to occupy a pivotal position in the development of the contemporary print through his work at these seminal workshops, at a variety of
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others here and abroad, and thru the editioning of graphics from his own studios in Florida and New York. Like most artists of his generation, with he began tentatively, with less than keen enthusiasm, without technical printing skills, and with unresolved notions about how art in the 1960’s---- so linked to the monumentality and physical presence inherited from abstract Expressionism--- could function on an intimate sheet of handmade paper. Burgeoning new technology soon dispelled any notion that prints were of necessity small. The opportunity to add a new arena of exploration (always initiated through his habitual process of clipping countless media images, destined to be transformed into drawings, collages, paintings, and on occasion, mixed-media objects) became and remains the impetus for Rosenquist’s lifelong fascination with the stone, the plate, and the myriad methodologies of multiple imagery”
In April 2009 Rosenquist’s house, office, and studio in Florida were completely destroyed by fire, where it is believed he lost his entire archive and collection of prints.
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Forehead 2 Lithograph 1968 Stone Lithograph Edition of 96 33 1/2" x 24 1/2"
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Pushbuttons Lithograph 1972 Edition of 75 Color Lithograph 31" x 36 1/2"
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Flameout For Picasso Lithograph 1973 From Homage to Picasso Portfolio, Edition of 175 30" x 22 1/2"
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Flamingo Capsule Lithograph/Screenprint 1973 Edition of 85 15 Color Lithograph/Screenprint 36 1/2" x 76"
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Carousel Etching 1978 Edition 1 of 78 17.75 " x 35.75 " 22.5 " X 40 "
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Diver’s Line Aquaint 1978 Edition of 78 28 1/2" x 40"
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Red Highway Trust Lithograph 1978 Edition of 78 Final Red State 23" x 47"
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Star Ladder (Second State) Lithograph 1978 Numbered 77/78 Color Aquatint 17 1/2" x 35 1/2"
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Tin Roof (Second State) Etching and Aquaint 1978 Edition of 78 24 ½” X 40”
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When a Leak Lithograph 1980 Edition of 58 Color Lithograph 43 1/4" x 54"
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Rails Lithograph 1982 Edition of 40 Color Lithograph/Screenprint 34 3/4" x 71"
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“Leaky Neck” Aquaint 1982 Edition of 59 Color Aquatint 33 1/2" x 26 1/2"
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