American master James Rosenquist brings his unique brand of imagery to the Miami Art Museums New Work Gallery for his first U.S. museum exhibition since his 40-year retrospective at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York in 2003. The exhibition, curated by MAM Assistant Director for Special Projects/Curator Lorie Mertes will be on view until July 2.

Two of the seven large-scale works on exhibit, Brazil and The Xenophobic Movie Director or Our Foreign Policy, are being shown for the first time in the United States. Both are stunning examples of Rosenquists signature style of massive scale paintings, derived from his early experience as a commercial billboard painter.

Since the late 1950s, James Rosenquist has been creating an exceptional and consistently intriguing body of work, Mertes said. As a leader in the American Pop art movement in the 1960s, he drew on the iconography of advertising and the mass media to conjure a sense of contemporary life and the political tenor of the times. Throughout his forty-year career, Rosenquist has demonstrated a command of texture, color, line and shape that dazzles audiences and influences younger generations of artists.

Rosenquist was the first artist to have an exhibition at MAM when it was the Center for Fine Arts. In 1983, he presented his 46-foot long painting Star Thief in CFAs auditorium as the centers first major event before its official opening day.

Rosenquists unique painting style, done without the aid of computers, smoothly transitions from the hyper-real to the highly abstract. Fragmented imagery, fluctuations in scale, and shifts in spatial relationships, combine to create dynamic compositions that become exercises in perception, challenging the eye to take it all in.

The exhibition at MAM, which includes paintings from 1987 to 2004, encompasses prevalent themes in Rosenquists body of work. It includes works that explore social, political and economic issues from a global perspective as well as works that express the artists ongoing fascination with space, technology and scientific theory.

Among Rosenquists works which comment on current events is Early Catapult (1992), a painting which was inspired by a trip he took to post-Cold War Berlin. Resting precariously atop a small circular canvas wrapped in chrome-plated barbed wire is a much larger, flame-filled painting. The paintings are juxtaposed with a piece of upholstered furniture, suggesting a relationship between domestic life and the historical sphere of human action, evoking the terrifying past of Nazi Germany and offering a warning on historical amnesia.

Rosenquists interest in themes of political and cultural transformation dates from 1965, when his F-111, an 86-foot multi-paneled painting named for a bomber plane launched Rosenquist to international acclaim. Recognized as a modern-day history painting, it was considered an anti-war statement approaching the significance and power of Pablo Picasso's Guernica (1937).

Paintings from Rosenquists Speed of Light series, also on view in the exhibition, articulate the artists perspective on experience and the passage of time. Abstract, colorful and dynamic, the Speed of Light series takes its name from Einsteins theory of relativity and the speed of lightin which one spectator sees an event differently from another spectator who is traveling at the speed of light. According to Rosenquist, Underneath it all is all my experience. The paintings are about my imagination as to a new view, or a new look at the speed of light. And they also have to do with the whole history of my experience put into a painting.




All images © James Rosenquist. All images photographed by Peter Foe. Images  (top to bottom):  Courtesy the artist and Acquavella Gallery, New York; Bobbi and Stephen Berkman Collection; Collection Judy and Sherwood Weiser; Courtesy the artist and Acquavella Gallery, New York