Homage to James Rosenquist, pop art pioneer

James Rosenquist started out as a billboard painter, poised on scaffolds high above New York's Times Square and across the city. In the glitzy world of consumerism, he created huge ads for the latest Hollywood films showing in two New York movie theaters, as well as advertisements for cars and candy stores.

Read more: The Museum Ludwig turns 40

"I painted billboards above every candy store in Brooklyn," he wrote in his 2009 autobiography.

Still life

Rosenquist started off by creating small-scale models before blowing the paintings up to gigantic proportions — and he kept that penchant for XXL size artwork throughout his life.

He would often cut objects from ads in magazines — Life magazine was a favorite — and reassemble them, transferring the new combination to a large canvas.

Unlike his pop art colleagues, Rosenquist never squirted paint on canvas, nor did he use screens or strainers. He painted broad strokes on canvas with a brush, creating a strong dynamic of shape and color. He was interested in the peripheral view, in details and shapes that blow open a person's range of vision, where close-up detail becomes blurred.

Tribute to an icon

Rosenquist was born in North Dakota to a family that never had much money. Issues of survival and existential concerns, combined with political worries, are a common theme throughout all his work.

Key artworks are on display now in Cologne at the Museum Ludwig retrospective entitled "Painting as Immersion," which runs from Novem­ber 18 to March 4, 2018.

Rosen­quist, the museum writes on its website, au­tho­rized the con­cept and the se­lec­tion of the works: "This will be the first ma­jor muse­um ex­hi­bi­tion as an ho­mage to the artist."

The exhibition offers a wide-ranging overview over his work from the mu­se­um's own col­lec­tion, loans from the Rosen­quist estate, and from mu­se­ums in the US, France and Sweden.

The show includes a veritable icon of the pop era: the im­pres­sive in­s­tal­la­tion F-111.

The huge painting was cre­at­ed in 1964-65, dur­ing one of the most po­lit­i­cal­ly tur­bu­lent de­cades in recent US his­to­ry.

Other displays document how the artist actually worked. Through painstaking research, museum staff found the magazine cake mix ad Rosenquist used as an element in the "President Elect" painting from the early 1960s (No. 5 in the gallery, above). Every one of the still life paintings is a comment on mass culture, as well as a political statement.

Click on the above gallery for an idea of what awaits visitors to the Museum Ludwig exhibition.