Speed of Light - James Rosenquist - till Nov 8

Stacey Duff talks with one of Pop Art’s most resilient masters, James Rosenquist, on the day of his Beijing debut

Hungry, broke and living down on the waterfront, James Rosenquist once asked a dockworker where he could get an orange. The man gruffed back in a rough Brooklyn accent, ‘You can’t get no oranges around here.’

An hour later, the worker came back with an entire crate of oranges. When the starving young artist offered to pay, he was told: ‘Take ’em. They fell off the truck.’ Through a combination of persistence and skill, Rosenquist would soon explode on the New York art scene.

In 1965 his now iconic painting ‘F-111’, appeared on the cover of The New York Times. Rosenquist emerged with the likes of his friend, Robert Rauschenberg, Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein.

But Rosenquist’s paintings were distinct from other Pop artists. His own work bore obvious resemblances – in scale, composition and content – to billboard painting. Billboard painting is a lost art today, but for several years it earned Rosenquist a living. He recalls dangling 22 stories above Times Square, painting signs.

‘I used to watch people go to and from Wall Street,’ Rosenquist, now 75, recalls. ‘And I thought “Whoa, am I lucky. Here I am living in a cosmopolitan city and I don’t’ have to go to work 9 to 5.”’

Rosenquist’s Beijing debut, entitled ‘Speed of Light’, is dramatically different from his monumental paintings. Still, the current series is dazzling – literally. Each work features up to a dozen colours as various abstract forms and shapes ricochet, or refract, off each other.

Experienced viewers will immediately recognise the challenges involved in making lithographs this complex. ‘One work required more than 30 plates,’ says master printmaker Bill Goldston of Universal Limited Art Editions. ‘It’s very timetaking. Also, my press is 40 inches long and this work is over 100 inches long, so we do it section by section.’

Last April, Rosenquist’s entire studio and home in Florida burnt down, destroying much of his life’s work. The man still seems to be resilience personified: whether searching after a crate of oranges or recovering from the 1971 car crash that ‘really stopped me for a few years’.

He told one interviewer: ‘Letting go is part of the game. You never really let go though, do you?’ This recent setback will certainly test that resilience, but James Rosenquist shines with this show in Beijing and he is already preparing for another in New York early next year.

‘Speed of Light’ is at DaFeng Gallery until November 8. See listings for details or visit Universal Limited Art Editions at www.ulae.com.