James Rosenquist Time Machine Illustrated, 2007

James Rosenquist (1933–2017) is one of the most influential American artists of his generation. Drawing on his background as a commercial billboard painter, he used collage techniques and popular imagery from magazines, as well as radical disjuncts of scale and enigmatic compositions, to create his own ‘idiosyncratic visual vocabulary’. Time Machine Illustrated (2007) is part of his Hole in the Middle of Time series which asks unanswerable questions about how we use time and what we do with it. The clock face at the centre of the canvas’s tripartite structure seems to melt into a red-tinged pool of water, recalling Salvador Dalí’s The Persistence of Memory (1931) and evoking Albert Einstein’s theory that time is not straight, but curved – a concept that fascinated the artist.