James Rosenquist

James Rosenquist is an American artist and one of the protagonists in the pop-art movement. From 1957 to 1960, he earned his living as a billboard painter. This was perfect training, as it turned out, for an artist about to explode onto the pop art scene. Rosenquist deftly applied sign-painting techniques to the large-scale paintings he began creating in 1960. Like other pop artists, Rosenquist adapted the visual language of advertising and pop culture to the context of fine art. Rosenquist achieved international acclaim in 1965 with the room-scale painting F-111.

His specialty is taking fragmented, oddly disproportionate images and combining, overlapping, and putting them on canvases to create visual stories. This can leave viewers breathless, making them consider even the most familiar objects (a U-Haul trailer, or a box of Oxydol detergent, etc.) in more abstract and provocative ways. In addition to painting, he has produced a vast array of prints, drawings and collages. One of his prints, Time Dust (1992), is thought to be the largest print in the world, measuring approximately 7 x 35 feet.