James Rosenquist (1933-2017) American, Signed and Numbered 3 Color Aquatint. Shows an apple inside a bottle on a red-streaked background. From his "Glass Wishes" Series. Numbered 36/59 and titled "Blood in Warm Water" in pencil bottom left. Signed and dated 1981 in pencil bottom right. Framing label on back. 

Overall Size: 29 x 36 in. 

Sight Size: 16 x 24 1/2 in. 

#8697 

James Albert Rosenquist was born on November 29th, 1933 in Grand Forks, North Dakota, the only child of Louis and Ruth Rosenquist. His parents were amateur pilots who moved from town to town to look for work, finally settling in Minneapolis, Minnesota. His mother, who was also a painter, encouraged her son artistically. In junior high school, Rosenquist won a short-term scholarship to study at the Minneapolis School of Art and subsequently studied painting at the University of Minnesota from 1952 to 1954, having already made commercial art for Phillips 66 by then. In 1955 he moved to New York City on scholarship to study at the Art Students League, studying abstract art under painters such as Edwin Dickinson and George Grosz. He supported himself by working as a chauffeur, eventually joining the International Brotherhood of Painters and Allied Trades. The Union put him to work painting billboards around Times Square, with him ultimately becoming the lead painter for Artkraft‐Strauss and painting displays and windows across Fifth Avenue. In 1960 Rosenquist abandoned painting signs after a friend died by falling from scaffolding on the job. The experience led him to focus on personal projects in his own studio, developing his own distinct style of painting that retained the kind of imagery, bold hues, and scale that he utilized while he painted billboards. Like his fellow pop artists, Rosenquist adapted the visual language of advertising and pop culture to the context of fine art, and Time Magazine did a write up on him in the 1970s that said “his powerful graphic style and painted montages helped define the 1960s Pop Art movement.” Rosenquist had his first two solo exhibitions at the Green Gallery in 1962 and 1963. He exhibited his painting F-111, a room-scale painting, at the Leo Castelli Gallery in 1965, which first garnered him international acclaim. In 1971 Rosenquist came to South Florida after receiving an offer from Donald Saff, dean of the University of South Florida’s College of Fine Arts, to participate in the school’s Graphicstudio, a collaborative art initiative. The experience led him to begin dividing his time more and more between New York and Florida, opening Aripeka Studio in 1976 to continue cooperating with students and other artists. He painted two murals for Florida’s state capitol building and created a sculpture for Johns Hopkins All Children’s Hospital, in addition to serving on the Tampa Museum of Art’s Board of Trustees. Rosenquist served a six-year term on the Board of the National Council of the Arts starting in 1978, and receiving the Golden Plate Award from the American Academy of Achievement in 1988. Beginning with his first early-career retrospectives in 1972 organized by the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Wallraf-Richartz Museum, he continued to hold yearly exhibitions around the world for the next forty years. He was married twice, and had one child with each wife. On April 25th, 2009 a fire swept through Hernando County in Florida, consuming his house, studios, and warehouse and destroying all of his stored paintings. Rosenquist died at his home in New York City on March 31st, 2017 after a long illness.