James Rosenquist

“ His American Life “

Acquavella Galleries

New York, 18 East 79th Street

His American Life, a major loan exhibition focusing on James Rosenquist’s (b. 1933-2017) compelling and poetic vision of postwar America. Born in 1933, at the height of the Great Depression, Rosenquist was raised in the Midwest during an era of war and patriotism. Beginning in the early 1960s, Rosenquist channeled his experience working as a billboard painter with his experience of America to create enigmatic but suggestive narratives. Out of popular images and commonplace objects, Rosenquist crafted a poetic visual language with jarring, unexpected couplings and haunting metaphors.

 The exhibition presents Rosenquist as a lyrical artist who painted what he saw and felt about the world around him, creating images that reflected his experience of American life and its political landscape.

Curated by Judith Goldman, the exhibition features seventeen paintings from the early 1960s through the early 1980s, focusing on the themes that would preoccupy him throughout his career. The show includes important loans from museums such as the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Whitney Museum of American Art; the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden; and the Spencer Museum of Art at the University of Kansas; in addition to loans from private collections.

On view until December 07 , 2018