American pop artist James Rosenquist: Painting as Immersion

As an essential part of the exhibition, the artist's process is also presented, where his work with popular culture images, adverts and magazines was initially translated into collages, which later formed the basis for the gigantic paintings. ARoS' curation shows a total of 52 works as well as some archive material. The close collaboration with Rosenquist Studio has enabled us to include these previously unseen collages and preparatory works in the exhibition.

James Rosenquist was born in North Dakota in 1933 and attended art school in Minnesota. He worked as an industrial worker and in advertising before moving to New York in the 1950s, where he soon began to socialise with artists from the generation before Pop Art - the artists known as the Abstract Expressionists. He shared a studio with other well-known American artists such as Ellsworth Kelly and Agnes Martin, through whom he got to know Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns. He worked as a sign painter in Brooklyn and Manhattan, with the large American sign formats better known as billboards. And he painted the same motifs over and over again. As he said: "I painted billboards over every kiosk in Brooklyn, to the extent that I can paint a Schenley whisky bottle in my sleep."

For the exhibition, we are preparing a catalogue in Danish, English and German. It will be a comprehensive production with the latest research in the field. In addition to the two directors Yilmaz Dziewior and Erlend G. Høyersten, the renowned German art historian Tom Holert, who writes about Rosenquist's unique spatialities; curator and specialist at Museum Ludwig Stephan Diederich, who examines the themes of the exhibition; the younger German art historian Tino Grass, who presents completely new angles on Rosenquist's work; conservator Isabel Gebhardt, who reports on the intensive conservation and research of the Horse Blinders work; Tim Griffin, former editor-in-chief of the renowned American art magazine Artforum, reports on the political potential of Pop art based on the work of James Rosenquist; and Sarah Bancroft, Studio Manager at Rosenquist Studio, has contributed a comprehensive article and biography supplemented with personal images

The exhibition will be the largest presentation of James Rosenquist in Europe to date.

Exhibition Manager: Chief Curator Lise Pennington

An exhibition by the Museum Ludwig in Cologne in cooperation with ARoS Aarhus Art Museum.

Terra Foundation for American Art

Augustinus Fonden

Beckett-Fonden

15. Juni Fonden