Perrotin New York is pleased to present Alain Jacquet & James Rosenquist, in collaboration with Kasmin and thanks to Sophie Matisse and Gaïa Jacquet-Matisse, Mimi Thompson and Lily Rosenquist. This sweeping exhibition elucidates the expressive work of Jacquet and Rosenquist. Most notably associated with the Pop Art movement, these two artists were contemporaries and friends who shared similar interests and practices. The gallery's first floor highlights the artists' interest in space, while the second floor features artwork from the 1960s.
Alain Jacquet and James Rosenquist: two artists forever labeled as Pop artists but whose work (like that of most good artists) transcends labels. Born in the 1930s and coming onto the art scene in the 1960s, they could not help but be marked by social transformations of the postwar era, what the French later came to call les trente glorieuses: a period of economic expansion and prosperity but also of profound anxiety, the causes of which included the cold war and attendant fears of nuclear disaster.
It was also the time when humans first ventured into space— science fiction fables seemed to be coming true—and this was another effort fueled by military competition between the Soviet Union and the United States; again, mixing optimism and unease. No wonder that evocations of outer space recur in both artists’ work, but curiously enough, starting only after the space program was receding from the headlines—in the 1970s in Jacquet’s case, and in Rosenquist’s, around 1980.