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Kasmin to represent the Estate of James Rosenquist

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June 25, 2021

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James Rosenquist

Kasmin is delighted to announce the U.S. representation of the Estate of James Rosenquist. One of the most important painters of post-war American art, Rosenquist (1933–2017) established a reputation as a founding member of the Pop art generation, radically altering the face of graphic culture and the art world. Having sharpened his expert visual communication skills through early commercial and billboard work, Rosenquist came to prominence creating high-impact paintings charged with cultural commentary, examining themes from the social, scientific and political, to the romantic, cosmic and existential. His work was described by the late American curator Walter Hopps as "visual poetry." In 2022, Kasmin will mount a major solo exhibition of work by the artist in New York.

Realized over the course of six decades, the work of James Rosenquist spans painting, sculpture, drawing, collage, and printmaking, and remains searingly immediate and relevant today. Pulsing with the political tenor of the 1960s, Rosenquist’s work began to critique a growing sense of mass consciousness pitched against the calamitous backdrop of the Vietnam War. Portraits of politicians collide with images of middle-class wealth and consumerism, asking us to question the impact of the dominant narratives encouraging dogmatic conformity in the U.S.
Born in Grand Forks, North Dakota, Rosenquist studied painting at the University of Minnesota with Cameron Booth. In 1955, he moved to New York having won a scholarship to the Art Students League, where he studied with Will Barnet, Edwin Dickinson and Robert Beverly Hale, among others. In 1957, he took a job painting billboards, working on scaffolds in Brooklyn and, a year later, high above Times Square. By 1960, Rosenquist had stopped painting commercial advertisements and rented a small studio space in Lower Manhattan where his neighbors included artists Robert Indiana, Ellsworth Kelly, and Jack Youngerman. During this period, Rosenquist, working against the prevailing tide of Abstract Expressionism, developed his own brand of New Realism—a style soon to be called Pop art. Rosenquist’s first solo exhibition at the Green Gallery in 1962 sold out and, in 1965, after working a year on the painting, Rosenquist exhibited his iconic fifty-nine panel F-111 at Leo Castelli Gallery. The 86ft-long work, one of Rosenquist’s most explicitly political, is now in the collection of The Museum of Modern Art, New York.

In 2019, Kasmin staged Two Paintings, an exhibition of monumental work by James Rosenquist. Presented at the gallery’s flagship location at 509 West 27th Street, Joystick (2002) and The Geometry of Fire (2011) reflect Rosenquist’s lifelong fascination with space, real and imagined, and demonstrate the artist’s turn in the last two decades of his career to a new kind of abstraction shaped by an abiding interest in the environment and the fate of the planet.

The announcement further demonstrates Kasmin’s commitment to leading the field in advocating for the legacy of artist estates. The gallery currently represents some of the most influential artists of the 20th century including Constantin Brancusi, William N. Copley, Stuart Davis, Max Ernst, Barry Flanagan, Jane Freilicher, Robert Indiana, Lee Krasner, Robert Motherwell, and George Rickey.

Kasmin will co-represent the Estate of James Rosenquist with Thaddaeus Ropac (London, Paris, Salzburg and Seoul).

James Rosenquist’s work is included in major private and public collections worldwide, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York and Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, Spain; Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Tate Gallery, London; Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, and Moderna Museet, Stockholm, among many others. He has been the subject of major retrospectives at the Whitney Museum of American Art (1972) and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (2003-04). In 2017, the Museum Ludwig, Cologne organized his most recent retrospective James Rosenquist: Painting as Immersion which traveled to the ARoS Aarhus Art Museum, Denmark.
About the Artist

James Rosenquist installing Horse Blinders (1968–69), Wallraf-Richartz-Museum, Cologne, 1972. Photo by Wolf P. Prange. Artwork

James Rosenquist

Realized over the course of six decades, the work of James Rosenquist spans painting, sculpture, drawing, collage, and printmaking. The artist’s work is included in major private and public collections worldwide, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York and Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, Spain; Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Tate Gallery, London; Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, and Moderna Museet, Stockholm, among many others. He has been the subject of major retrospectives at the Whitney Museum of American Art (1972) and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (2003-04). In 2017, the Museum Ludwig, Cologne organized his most recent retrospective James Rosenquist: Painting as Immersion which traveled to the ARoS Aarhus Art Museum, Denmark.

All images: © 2022 James Rosenquist, Inc. / Licensed by Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
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