James Rosenquist

Rosenquist made his first lithographs in 1964–65 at Universal Limited Art Editions at the invitation of Tatyana Grosman. Fred Genis first met Rosenquist at U.L.A.E. in 1967, re-proofing Expo 1967 Mural — Firepole, initially printed by Priede. The work closely relates, as do most of Rosenquist’s prints, to a painting of the same title — a monumental 33-foot mural painted for Expo 1967 in Montreal, Canada.

It was at Hollanders Workshop in 1970 that Rosenquist made seven lithographs with Genis and Hollander. The most technically complex of these was Area Code — a diptych printed in sixteen colours, a feat that demonstrated both the ambition of the artist and the extraordinary skill required of the printer to realise it. When Genis was working in the Netherlands in 1973, he was commissioned by Petersburg Press to collaborate with Rosenquist again on Flower Garden, extending a creative partnership that had by then spanned nearly a decade.

Rosenquist’s prints are characterised by the same cinematic scale and fragmented imagery as his paintings — works that demand both technical mastery from the printer and a willingness to think boldly about what a lithograph could be.

James Rosenquist died in New York in 2017, leaving behind one of the most distinctive bodies of work in postwar American art.