James Rosenquist at MoMA

Kasmin is delighted to share that James Rosenquist's monumental painting, The Geometry of Fire  is on view in The Samuel and Ronnie Heyman Lobby in The Museum of Modern Art, New York.

The Geometry of Fire was included in Kasmin's 2019 exhibition, James Rosenquist: Two Paintings, and is a reflection of real space. Painted after a devastating fire destroyed the artist’s Florida studio, the 25 foot long picture depicts the wildness of fire on the left and the destruction it causes, seen in the melting, exploding hub caps on the right. At the picture’s center is the mysterious cosmos, populated with the galaxies, star showers and black holes that became the subject of Rosenquist’s last paintings.

One of the most important painters of post-war American Art, James Rosenquist (1933–2017) was born in Grand Forks, North Dakota. He studied painting at the University of Minnesota with Cameron Booth. In 1955, he moved to New York having won a scholarship to the Art Students League, where he studied with Will Barnet, Edwin Dickinson and Robert Beverly Hale, among others. In 1957, he took a job painting billboards, working on scaffolds in Brooklyn and, a year later, high above Times Square. Rosenquist’s first solo exhibition at the Green Gallery in 1962 sold out and established Rosenquist’s reputation as a founding member of the Pop art generation. In 1965, after working a year on the painting, Rosenquist exhibited his iconic F-111, now in the collection of The Museum of Modern Art.