James Rosenquist

JAMES ROSENQUIST (United States, 1933).
"Cliff Hanger (State II)".
Etching on paper. Copy 25/ 78.
Signed, dated and justified in pencil.
Measurements: 45 x 91 cm; 58 x 101 cm (paper).
Exponent of American Pop Art, Rosenquist moved to New York in 1955 to join the Art Students League. However, he dropped out of school a year later and began painting billboards. In 1960, however, he quit this job and rented a small studio in Manhattan, where he counted among his neighbors artists such as Robert Indiana, Ellsworth Kelly and Jack Youngerman. Two years later he held his first solo exhibition, which took place at the Green Gallery in New York. From then on his work would be included in the groundbreaking exhibitions that would establish Pop Art as a movement. In 1965 Rosenquist achieved international recognition with his monumental work "F-111" (MoMA), in which he combined painting with a collage of prints, drawings and other elements. Since the 1960s this artist has received numerous awards: he was chosen as a Young Talent of Art in America in 1963, awarded by the National Council on the Arts in 1978, and in 1987 he was named a member of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. In 1972 the first retrospective exhibition of his work was held, organized by the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Wallraf-Richartz Museum in Cologne, and since then he has been the subject of numerous exhibitions held in museums and galleries around the world. He is currently represented at the Metropolitan Museum, MoMA, the Brooklyn and Whitney Museums in New York, the Tate Gallery in London, the Guggenheim Museums in New York and Bilbao, the National Gallery in Washington D.C., the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Albright-Knox Gallery in Buffalo, the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Trento, the Thyssen-Bornemisza in Madrid and many others.