Forehead II
James Rosenquist
American, 1933–2017
1968
A lithograph by James Rosenquist that assembles billboard-style fragments — a mechanical grille, a washed-out flesh tone, and a knotted mass of tubular forms — to probe how mass media breaks bodies and objects into image-signals.
You notice three horizontal bands: a teal-trimmed black grille across the top, a pale, blurred pink wash like a cropped part of a face in the middle, and below a dense, airbrushed field of glossy, snake-like tubes in soft gray and white highlights.
By transplanting advertising imagery and airbrush effects into lithography, Rosenquist helped expand Pop Art’s language—blurring boundaries between commercial visual culture and fine art and questioning how images shape perception in the consumer era.
Medium
Lithograph
Dimensions
irreg composition 28 7/16 x 24 3/8" (72.2 x 61.9 cm)
sheet 33 7/8 x 24 1/2" (86 x 62.3 cm)
Classification
Department
Credit
John B. Turner Fund
Accession
306.1969
Palette
Art Terms
Exhibitions
