James Rosenquist b. 1933

James Rosenquist is an American artist known for his significant contributions to the Pop Art movement. Rosenquist studied painting at the University of Minnesota and later moved to New York to study at the Art Students League on scholarship in 1955. His first job out of school was as a billboard painter, which has heavily influenced his painting style for the rest of his career.

Rosenquist became particularly fascinated with advertisements and began incorporating consumer products into his work, creating large-scale works as his internationally famous work F-111 (1965), which is 10 feet high and 86 feet long. He made murals for the New York World's Fair, created installations for galleries and held retrospectives across the globe. His work is very political, often responding to American militarism, commercialism and the American Dream. Rosenquist's record sale was achieved in 2014 when Be Beautiful (1964) sold for $2.8 million at Sotheby's New York.

James Rosenquist's work is featured in the permanent collections of the MoMA in New York, the Metropolitan Museum in New York, the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, the Los Angeles MCA, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Deutsche Guggenheim in Berlin, the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris and the Tate Modern in London.

Related Categories: Pop Art, Art of the 1960s, Post-War American Art, Popular Culture, Americana, The Fantastic, Figurative Painting, United States, Painting, Appropriation.