CANBERRA, AUSTRALIA.- The National Gallery of Australia presents Welcome to the Water Planet - Paperworks by James Rosenquist, on view through September 12, 2006. Rosenquist: Welcome to the water planet is a spectacular exhibition of monumental paper pulp works intended to act as both a celebration and a warning to what might happen to the earth. The exhibition of works by American artist James Rosenquist investigates problems of a growing consumer culture, which could lead to the degradation of the natural environment.

James Rosenquist originally made a name for himself as an artist associated with the 1960s Pop Art movement in New York. Working on huge canvases and incorporating imagery from the mass media. Rosenquist’s popularity as an artist had him regularly showing at Pop Art’s mecca, the Leo Castelli Gallery in New York.

Over numerous months in 1988 and 1989, Rosenquist worked with the printer publisher Ken Tyler to produce 720 sheets of handmade, hand-coloured paper forming the basis of the series Welcome to the water planet, which combines commonplace objects like pots and flowers with extraterrestrial imagery.

In the exhibition, Rosenquist: Welcome to the water planet, the artist evokes the colourful and sensual riches of the earth and brilliant flora of his Floridian home, set within a wondrous starlit universe. Rosenquist combines this subject matter with contrasting imagery about the mistreatment and destruction of the earth, including fighter planes and torpedoes in the form of acid-green pencils and ruby-red lipsticks. Presented in brilliant luminous colours and on a massive scale the works show earth as a rich but vulnerable ‘water planet’, under threat from a growing consumer culture.