BILBAO, SPAIN.- From today, the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao will present James Rosenquist: A Retrospective, the first comprehensive survey of the artist’s work in all media in more than thirty years. This ambitious exhibition has become a reality thanks to the generous contribution, once again, of BBVA. The exhibition will feature nearly 150 works including paintings, sculptures, drawings, prints and source collages gathered from museums and private collections in the U.S., Europe, and from the collection of the artist. The exhibition will remain on view at the Museum through October 17, 2004.
Since the late 1950s, James Rosenquist has been creating an exceptional and consistently intriguing body of work. A leader in the American Pop art movement in the 1960s with contemporaries Jim Dine, Roy Lichtenstein, Claes Oldenburg, and Andy Warhol, Rosenquist drew on the iconography of advertising and the mass media to conjure a sense of contemporary life and the political tenor of the times. Originally from the Midwest and now working in New York and Florida, Rosenquist has developed a distinctly American voice, yet his work comments upon popular culture from a global perspective. From his early days as a billboard painter to his recent use of abstract painting techniques, Rosenquist has demonstrated his interest in and mastery of texture, color, line and shape that continues to dazzle audiences and influence younger generations of artists.
This exhibition has been curated by Walter Hopps and Sarah Bancroft. Hopps holds the position of Adjunct Senior Curator of Twentieth Century Art at both The Menil Collection and the Guggenheim Museum. Sarah Bancroft is Assistant Curator at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum.
Spanning more than four decades, the scope of James Rosenquist: A Retrospective will provide both an historical context for Rosenquist’s early Pop works as well as elucidate his continued importance in the art of the late-twentieth and early-twenty-first centuries. The exhibition will begin with some of the earliest abstractions that Rosenquist made after his arrival in New York in 1955, when Abstract Expressionism was the dominant artistic movement. It will show the artist’s stylistic evolution in the 1960s with the eye-catching paintings that led to Rosenquist’s association with Pop art. These early paintings—much influenced by his previous experience as a commercial billboard painter—were the first to bring Rosenquist public acclaim. The show will continue to explore Rosenquist’s career to the present day, bringing together several of the artist’s murals of epic subjects and monumental proportions, including the three-painting-suite The Swimmer in the Econo-mist (1997–98) exhibited in the Permanent Collection Pop Art presentation in gallery 104.
Gallery space will be devoted to an in-depth look at Rosenquist’s works on paper, which relate closely to his paintings. A large number of the artist’s collages, used in preparation for his canvases and artworks in their own right, will be shown for the first time and will lend new insight into his working process. By considering his art as a whole, audiences can begin to understand the complexity of Rosenquist’s aesthetic and ideological concerns.
For BBVA, it is a source of great satisfaction to have this new opportunity of collaborating once again with the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao in the presentation of this retrospective exhibition dedicated to the North American artist James Rosenquist. Our participation in this exhibition represents the latest chapter in a close and fruitful period of collaboration with the Museum, which began with an agreement signed in 1997, in virtue of which BBVA became a member of the Board of Trustees of its Foundation and undertook to sponsor one of the exhibitions included in its annual artistic program. This relationship has taken the form of joint projects of an extremely high level, such as: China: 5,000 years (1998), From Dürer to Rauschenberg: A Quintessence of Drawing. Masterworks from the Albertina and Guggenheim Collections (1999), Degas to Picasso: Painters, Sculptors, and the Camera (2000), The worlds of Nam June Paik (2001), Paris: Capital of the Arts, 1900–1968 (2002) and, last year, Calder: Gravity and Grace.
The exhibition we present on this occasion, James Rosenquist: A Retrospective, is the most exhaustive analysis of the oeuvre of this artist, executed over the last thirty years. During this time, Rosenquist has explored all kinds of media. The exhibition, which covers a period of more than four decades, from 1955 to the present-day, provides the historical context for Rosenquist’s first experiments in Pop Art, and highlights his importance on the artistic scene of the late 20th and early 21st centuries.
Curated by Walter Hopps and Sarah Bancroft, the exhibition contains approximately 150 works of art and features paintings, sculptures, drawings, prints and collages, on loan from museums and private collections in the United States and Europe, as well as works from the artist’s own collection. Together with Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein and Claes Oldenburg, James Rosenquist is considered to be one of the foremost exponents of the American Pop Art movement of the sixties. This exhibition delves into the creative process of this artist and traces the development of his style from his first works, influenced by his experience as a billboard painter, to his recent murals of abstract subjects and monumental proportions, inspired by his work in the world of advertising.
