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

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  • “In Stowaway, I pushed my intrinsic interest in abstraction, in images without the baggage of images, and I pushed color and form around to create the most exciting surface I could imagine, trying to make light come out of a piece of paper.”
    —James Rosenquist  
    The Stowaway Peers out at the Speed of Light captures the idea of something that has been changed by the speed of light, building a composition that is constantly disintegrating in front of the viewer’s eyes through a collision of zoomed in, up-close images – harkening back to Rosenquist’s days as a billboard painter. “I was melting objects into an abstraction. I was getting back to my pre-pop roots.”i More organized and dimensional in the left of the composition, occupied with precisely rendered reflective objects, the print slowly descends into something more free and chaotic, waves of energy that vibrate with irregular motion and bounce between each other. And finally, the right-hand quadrant is home to more gestural, Abstract Expressionist forms.ii

     

    To match this explosion of color and overlapping collaged forms, the title alludes to a stowaway in a high-speed spaceship daring to take a glance out the window on a treacherous, intergalactic voyage, unsure of where he is going or if he will make it. 

     

     Source for The Stowaway Peers Out at the Speed of Light, 2000. Collage and mixed media on plywood, with adventitious marks. 14 x 29 ½ in. (35.6 x 74.9 cm). Collection of the estate of James Rosenquist. © James Rosenquist, Inc. / Licensed by Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

     

    i James Rosenquist, Painting Below Zero: Notes on a Life in Art, 2009, p. 326.

    ii Walter Hopps, “Connoisseur of the Inexplicable,” in Walter Hopps and Sarah Bancroft, James Rosenquist: A Retrospective, 2003, pp. 13-14.

    • Literature

      Ars Publicata, James Rosenquist, 2001.01

246

The Stowaway Peers Out at the Speed of Light

2001
Monumental lithograph in colors, on Saunders Waterford paper, with full margins.
I. 36 x 96 in. (91.4 x 243.8 cm)
S. 46 x 105 3/4 in. (116.8 x 268.6 cm)

Signed, titled, dated and numbered 'AP 3/12' in pencil (an artist's proof, the edition was 40), published by Universal Limited Art Editions, West Islip, New York (with their blindstamp), framed.

Full Cataloguing

Estimate
$15,000 - 25,000 

Sold for $27,940

Works from the James Rosenquist Estate

New York Auction 15 February 2024