Description

In 1960, after experimenting with abstraction for four years, James Rosenquist began producing large-scale compositions of fragmentary images selected from advertisements and posters. Before gaining recognition as one of Pop Art's central figures, the artist earned a living painting billboards. That experience helped lay the foun-dation for his style. The sizable canvas, challenging juxtapositions, and simple forms of Sheer Line recall billboard imagery. Rosenquist also shifted the scale of the objects depicted. enlarging the bottle opening until it dwarfed the boat, for example, to remove them from their customary contexts. Dislocated yet alluring, the images suggest wordless advertisements. Rosenquist felt that the approach he used in his paintings was the direct product of everyday experience.