James Rosenquist: A Famous American Pop Art Artist

One of the central characters of the Pop Art movement, James Rosenquist was born on November 29, 1933 in Grand Forks, North Dakota to Louis and Ruth Rosenquist. His mother, who was also a painter, influenced James to develop his artistic talents. When he was in junior high school, he won an interim scholarship to study at the Minneapolis School of Art. From 1952 to 1954 he studied painting at the University of Minnesota. In 1955 at the age of twenty one, he received a scholarship to study at the Art Student's League in New York City.

From 1957 to 1960 Rosenquist worked as a billboard painter. It turned out to be an ideal foundation for the budding artist and he skillfully applied the sign-painting techniques to many paintings created during the period. This was a time in his life when he befriended many other artists of the Pop Art movement including Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Mark Rothko, and Jackson Pollack.

In 1965 Rosenquist achieved international approval for his room-scale painting on canvas "F-111" at his first solo exhibition at the Leo Castelli Gallery, New York. Following this exhibition Rosenquist's long lasting career as a pop art artist developed further with critical acclaim for many subsequent paintings including "The President Elect", "The Untitled", "Growth Plan" , "Speed of Light", "Marilyn Monroe" and many more. Besides painting, he has also developed a very large collection of prints, collages and drawings. One of his most renowned prints, "Time Dust", created in 1992, was at that time the largest print in the world, measuring 7 x 35 feet.

As an artist he specializes in using fragmented and strangely uneven images for creating disoriented, poetic and often mystifying paintings. Many of his paintings show disproportionate and fragmented images on the painted Canvas with even the most recognizable objects take on an abstract appearance. His paintings often share appositions of metaphors from advertisements and magazines, political and autobiographical mediums. Rosenquist now also creates paintings on the themes of anti-violence, death, time and cosmic references.

Rosenquist has received several honors and awards for his extraordinary skill. In 1963 he was selected by the art magazine, Art in America, as "Young Talent Painter USA" in recognition of his mural painting on a building at the New York World's Fair. In 1978 he was appointed member of the Board of the National Council of Arts for a term of six years. In 1988, he received the Golden Plate Award from the American Academy of Achievement. He was also given the annual International Award for Art by the Fundación Cristóbal Gabarrón in 2002 in appreciation of his valuable contributions to universal culture.