This work is from the edition of 75
Published by Petersburg Press, London. Lithograph on Hodgkinson Handmade Oatmeal Paper
Size 31 × 36 in | 78.7 × 91.4 cm
1973
Signature Signed, titled, dated and numbered.
MLA will provide a letter of authentication for this artwork.
James Rosenquist (b. 1933) is one of the most important contributors to American Pop Art. Shortly after moving to New York City in the 1950's (to study fine art) Rosenquist became a commercial painter working on advertising billboards. For nearly three years he worked non-stop as a commercial painter - which would be both the technical training and inspiration for his aesthetic as an artist.
In the early 1960's he began exhibiting paintings that resembled collages of elements from American advertising of the era. In "Push Buttons" Rosenquist spoofs the erotic connection between woman and machine. Drawn from a 1955 Plymouth ad featuring a gloved woman pressing the buttons, Rosenquist juxtaposes the male hand and the female leg closely together with the buttons of the automobile. The buttons are so sharply contrasted you can almost feel them click, and the combination of the images perfectly insinuates commercial and sexual desire.
This work is a paradigm of Rosenquist's aesthetic and technique, yet is understated and realized in a black and white palette. Rosenquist, though he drew constantly on the technical image world as a source for motifs, expressed indifference to the internet and eschewed mechanical means of production, maintaining his faith in the human hand and its wondrous abilities as shown by the old masters in works, as he said, “made with minerals mixed in oil schmeared on cloth with hair from the back of a pig’s ear.” His early experience as a painter of billboards had taught him how traditional tools used in a new context and at a different scale afforded entirely new effects. For him, the ancient tools retained infinite possibilities.
Major Pop artist James Rosenquist used sign-painting techniques to make kaleidoscopic canvases that conjure American advertising. He embraced the visual language of commercial art, filtering images of shiny American objects through a cool, Surrealism-inflected lens. His paintings, murals, and prints evoke billboards and posters, yet they remain more mysterious and unresolved than any editorial campaign could allow. Rosenquist took art classes at the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, before moving to New York and briefly joining the Art Students League. He also worked as a billboard painter.
Rosenquist’s work has been shown in New York, London, Paris, Berlin, Tokyo, Rome, and Los Angeles, and belongs in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Centre Pompidou, the Museum of Modern Art, the Tate, the Guggenheim Museum, Moderna Museet, and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, among others. His paintings have sold for up to seven figures at auction.
This work will be shipped free of charge, if within the US. International shipping will be $150, via DHL.
