ART GALLERY
Photograph by Robert McKeever, courtesy of Gagosian Gallery
©James Rosenquist / VAGA, N. Y. & JASPAR, Tokyo, 2013 E0434
- Lanai
- A seemingly incoherent group of images - canned peaches, an upside down car, a nude woman at poolside, a pencil - arranged as if a collage. The images are greatly enlarged by the hand of the artist. The title, Lanai, refers to a Hawaiian island, but is also a word meaning veranda or a type of roofed patio that serves in Hawaii as a kind of living room. The images bring to mind something of a luxurious resort, but there is nothing to concretely link them. Rosenquist acquired his visually striking sense of color and the techniques of enlargement and extreme close-up through his work as a billboard artist in New York. In 1960, giving up painting billboards, he created artworks by combining and making enlargements, to great dramatic effect, from clippings of readily available magazine advertisement images. After having taken part in the 1962 "New Realists" exhibition, he became an instant success as a Pop artist. Lanai, with its bright colors on a huge canvas, unabashedly demonstrates Rosenquist's compositional genius in putting together realistic images of great descriptive power.