James Rosenquist - Contemporary Art Part I New York Thursday, May 14, 2009 | Phillips

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  • Provenance


    Acquired directly from the artist

  • Catalogue Essay

    After moving to New York City from Minneapolis in 1957 at just 21 years of age, James Rosenquist worked as a large scale commercial billboard painter. The painterly technique he mastered and the wide range of source material he encountered would prove crucial to his development into a gallery artist. In the early 60s, alongside Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein and Claes Oldenberg, James Rosenquist exploded unto the Pop Art scene with a body of work which adapted the visual language of advertising and popular culture to the context of fine art. His colorful and monumental canvases of disoriented yet poetic images employ flat commercial painterly techniques to explore the abstracting possibilities of scale and perspective.
    The present work, Untitled #1 (Neiman Marcus), 2002, belongs to a recent series, “The Speed of Light,” where Rosenquist captures the essence of abstraction through the representation of reflected light and fragmented movement. The gestural brushstrokes of vivid colors define biomorphic forms that hint at a possible narrative, as Rosenquist points out: “something that may look like a shiny cylinder disintegrates into something that’s not a cylinder while you are looking at it.” (B. Schwabsky, “James Rosenquist,” ArtForum, September, 2001)

20

Untitled #1 (Neiman Marcus)

2002
Oil on linen laid on board.
70 x 65 in. (177.8 x 165.1 cm).
Signed and dated “James Rosenquist 2002” on the reverse.

Estimate
$250,000 - 350,000 

Sold for $422,500

Contemporary Art Part I

14 May 2009, 7pm
New York