James Rosenquist - Works from the James Rosenquist Estate New York Thursday, February 15, 2024 | Phillips

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  • “In Hey Let’s Go for a Ride, the girl’s face and the soda bottle burst out of the frame right in your face. You’re in the picture. It’s coming at you as if you’re a couple of inches from the girl holding the soda bottle. You almost have to back off.”
    —James Rosenquist

     

    Expansively dynamic and masterfully rendered, Hey! Let’s Go For A Ride offers a technically remarkable graphic reinvention of Rosenquist’s 1961 painting of the same name: painterly brushstrokes are reconstructed as magnified airbrush dots, and his softly blended contours are transformed into hardline, over-splattered graphic patterns. These rearticulations breathe new life into one of Rosenquist’s earlier paintings and speaks to the artist’s uncanny ability to develop compositions that are equally strong across mediums and scales. “The process was about practicing to see how skillfully I could do the images in lithography… to see if I could work in this medium, to see if I could get the feeling on a miniature scale," Rosenquist said. "They were really like my notebook, and I was restudying the paintings in another medium… When you take a large painting that maintains itself as a small image, as a composition or idea… it is strong if it is good, and that’s really peculiar.”i

     

    In part, these stunning results are owed to Rosenquist’s decision to take it upon himself and painstakingly re-render the image by hand for the print edition, utilizing the textures found in commercial printing to inspire his vision for his own lithograph. As Maurice Sanchez, master printer of Petersburg Press, recalled, “he didn’t use crisp 4 x 5’ transparencies he could have gone to Leo’s [the Castelli Gallery] and found, but reproductions of paintings – way off, hyped-up reproductions that added another dimension to his original vision. The reproductions were Benday dotted, and the closest you could get to that look was with an airbrush…”ii Like commercially printed Ben-Day dots, a graphic element also reappropriated notably by Rosenquist’s contemporary Roy Lichtenstein, the airbrush technique Rosenquist utilizes imparts a uniquely bold shading effect to the image, further separating the print from its painted counterpart and illustrating Rosenquist’s lively and experimental printmaking process.

     

    Rosenquist and Roy Lichtenstein at showing of Time Dust, 1992, Gagosian Gallery, New York, 1993. Courtesy of the Estate of James Rosenquist.

     

     

    i James Rosenquist, quoted in Constance Glenn, James Rosenquist: Time Dust, Complete Graphics 1962 – 1992, 1993, p. 54.

    ii Maurice Sanchez, quoted ibid., p. 52.

    • Literature

      Constance Glenn 55

217

Hey! Let's Go for a Ride (G. 55)

1972
Lithograph in colors, on Hodgkinson handmade Wookey Hole paper, with full margins.
I. 22 1/4 x 22 1/2 in. (56.5 x 57.2 cm)
S. 31 1/2 x 30 1/8 in. (80 x 76.5 cm)

Signed, titled, dated and numbered 'H.C. 3/13' in pencil (an hors commerce, the edition was 75 and 20 artist's proofs), published by Petersburg Press, New York (with their blindstamp), framed.

Full Cataloguing

Estimate
$3,000 - 5,000 

Sold for $9,525

Works from the James Rosenquist Estate

New York Auction 15 February 2024