1961

Zone

American, 1933 - 2017

James Rosenquist has called Zone his first entirely Pop painting, created not long after he quit his job as a billboard artist working high above the streets of New York City. Zone juxtaposes a woman's face with a dewy tomato, although the drastic difference in scale and the grayed tones of the composition render the painting's iconography virtually unrecognizable without careful scrutiny. With this work, Rosenquist initiated his practice of using scraps of magazine advertisements to make preparatory collages for his Pop Art canvases. The result is a fragmented composition sliced into two distinct but interlocking sections, or zones.