James Rosenquist's 'The Geometry of Fire' Rosenquist's painting enters the collection at MoMA
James Rosenquist's monumental painting The Geometry of Fire, 2011 has recently entered the collection of The Museum of Modern Art, New York, where it is currently on view in The Samuel and Ronnie Heyman Lobby.
Trained as a billboard painter, and aptly nicknamed the "billboard Michelangelo", in The Geometry of Fire Rosenquist replaces the nearly touching hands of The Creation of Adam, iconically poised for the passing of the spark of life. In this 25-foot long work, neat lines intersect at that same point but depict a geometric supernova where fire and molten metal are blown apart and rip through the fabric of the cosmos. Painted following a devastating fire which ravaged Rosenquist's studio in the spring of 2009, The Geometry of Fire is an elemental and entropic image, a dialectic depiction of painting itself as an act which is both generative and destructive.
James Rosenquist became known in the 1960s as a leading American Pop artist alongside Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Claes Oldenburg and others. Like his contemporaries, Rosenquist used commercial art techniques and the depiction of popular imagery and everyday objects, but his work also tested the possibilities of perception, of the image and of the painted medium itself, combining figuration, collage and found objects to convey the contradictions inherent to the American experience. By cropping, fragmenting and re-colouring images from magazines, combined with the skills and gestures of sign-painting, Rosenquist developed a new language that differentiated him from the second generation of Abstract Expressionists and set him apart from his peers. Utilising techniques borrowed from advertising, described by the late American curator Walter Hopps as 'visual poetry', his work has plumbed questions ranging from the economic, romantic, and ecological to the scientific, cosmic and existential.
Rosenquist's work F-111, 1964-65 also remains on view in MoMA's collection galleries, in Gallery 418.
