Rosenquist, James Albert (1933– )

US painter and printmaker. He was a seminal figure in American pop art. In his paintings, fragmented images drawn from advertising and the mass media are enlarged to huge proportions and juxtaposed against each other in a deadpan manner, as in I Love You with My Ford (1961; Moderna Museet, Stockholm). He continued to produce large-scale commissions, including the three-painting suite The Swimmer in the Econo-mist (1997–98) for Deutsche Guggenheim Berlin.

Rosenquist worked as an industrial sign and billboard painter in the early 1950s. While studying and working in New York 1955–57, he met Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns and began painting his first colossal-scale works 1960–61. His renowned F-111, 26 m/85 ft in length and first shown in 1965, includes an American military aeroplane and child under a hairdryer among its images, reading as a comment on war and helplessness. In addition to painting, he has produced a vast array of prints, drawings, and collages; his print Time Dust (1992) is thought to be the largest print in the world, measuring 10.5 m/35 ft by 2 m/7 ft.