James Rosenquist | "Drifter: Speed of Light", 2000 | (for Parkett 58)
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Parkett Vol. 58
Quote from Parkett
"The significance of Rosenquist’s new approach to painting around 1960-1961, lies not only in his choice of images culled from the mass media, but also in his decision to utilize the specialized knowledge embedded in the billboard painter’s craft: for achieving effects of quasi-photographic form, and for scaling upt tiny images to immense proportions."
Michael Lobel, Parkett No. 58, 2000
"Drifter: Speed of Light", 2000 (for Parkett 58)
9-color lithograph on Somerset soft white paper,
17 1/4 x 14 5/8” (44 x 37,1 cm),
printed by Maurice Sanchez, Derrière L’Etoile Studio, New York,
Ed. 60/XX, signed and numbered
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For Jim (from Pontus Hulten / Parkett no. 58)
The pleasure of painting is what radiates from all of James Rosenquist’s works. Pleasure and curiosity, joy of life and living. There is something I can easily recognize, something familiar, but something hard to describe, something very esoteric, vague, evasive. Do I dare to try to define it? I have to try, because Jim has asked me to write this text. I know what it is: We are both dumb Swedes, one from North Dakota, one from Stockholm. What is it that I can recognize so clearly, so easily, with such pleasure as Swedish in Jim ’s painting? It is a certain naïveté that I am also proud of owning myself, a certain basic optimism. Life is full of consequences and lets us live with them, the best way we can. Jim ’s work expands his curiosity, his amusement, his surprises, and also the way that he has found to be able to accept it all, because it is wonderful to be able to add the evidence of another discovery to the endless richness of everyday. Enormous energy, quiet, shy, curious of life, remaining curious, year after year. Terrific power of invention, of putting conventions upside down. Those are a few elements of Jim Rosenquist’s virtues.
Jim Rosenquist told me once that when he was painting gigantic street signs, sitting on a hanging chair, he had to paint a fifty-square-meter surface red. When he turned around, the whole world was green.
Artist Video
In this short video excerpt James Rosenquist talks about some aspects of his art.
Parkett Text
Read a selected text on James Rosenquist
Parkett Cover
James Rosenquist’s work on the cover of Parkett no. 58
