James Rosenquist

James Rosenquist began painting billboards as commercial artist from 1957 to 1960. It was from this background that he emerged as one of the leading members of the Pop Art Movement. Throughout his career he has worked in a variety of mediums, including prints, drawings, and collages. He has received various awards including ?Art in American Young Talent USA? in 1978, the Golden Plate Award from the American Academy of Achievement in 1988, and the Fundacion Cristobal Gabarron annual international award for art in 2002. The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum recently held a retrospective of his work in 2004.

In the 1980?s, Rosenquist, in collaboration with the Graphicstudio atelier, created a series of large scale mixed media prints. The art work is a combination of hand painted monoprints of flowers collaged with lithographic prints of women. The two techiniques work together to provide a striking contrast of subject matter and composition utilizing both the looseness of the monoprint and the tightness of the lithograph. These large prints are bold in color, and the two images of flowers and woman seem to almost tear at each other creating a dramatic composition.

Images courtesy of Graphicstudio/USF