Description
Original poster James Rosenquist “Ice Point” – XIV Olympic Winter Games, Sarajevo. Original offset color lithograph. An archive, vintage poster, printed in 1984, now collectible and in short supply.
Art and Sport portfolio: The Yugoslav Olympic Committee of the Winter Olympic Games Sarajevo 1984 wished to give a certain cultural-artistic accent to this world festivity. The admire of the Olympic idea, those who have a liking for the Olympic winter sports and the art connected with them will be, in agreement with the art publisher Visconti Art Lazo Vujić, honored by creations contributed by world known prominent artist. A portfolio containing sixteen original prints, handsigned and numbered by the artists, is published in a limited edition of 200 originals by each artist. Names like Dorazio, Folon, Greco, Helnwein, Hodgkin, Hwang, Kolar, Moore, Paladino, Pistoletto, Rosenquist, Santomaso, Stupica, Twombly and Warhol guarantee the high quality of the artistic idea and its realization. The size of the original print is 85 x 62 cm. The edition of the original graphic portfolio will be accompanied by limited editions of art posters of the same size, not numbered, but each of them carrying an impression of the inscription “Olympic Games Sarajevo 1984” and its logotype.
The themes proposed by the artists are either winter sports, the Olympic idea or the town of Sarajevo. All the artists remain faithful to their own specific expression, using the formal elements of the language developed through the years of their creative presence in world’s art. So every print included in the portfolio is at the same time a particular contribution to the continuity of their artistic orientation, the theme being an additional iconographic impulse to their visual research. The symbiosis of the Olympic idea and art is certainly an interesting creative proposal that will fascinate art-collectors and sport-lovers as well.
James Rosenquist is one of the biggest American artist of second part of the 20th century. He studied in New York, where he worked as a designer and produced commercial billboards. The color that he carried as a legacy of his work, were used for the production of abstract painting, which he called excavations and wrong-colored paintings. Even before encountering the art of Warhol, Lichtenstein and other pop artists, he produced works in this style. Rosenquist differs from the other members of the pop art movement because some of his works feature political content. As other pop artists,he is aware of the power of advertising, so in his work he uses a wide range of items taken from commercial billboards. In his massively sized works he combines the abstract with everyday objects and intentionally idealizes trivial themes. He put everyday objects into intergalactic space, creating a dynamic composition with intense colors and different materials. We can see Rosenquist’s engagement with mainstream and mass-produced objects, entertainment, and the luxury of leisure. The title of this composition, created for the Winter Olympic Games in Sarajevo, Rosenquist refers to the moment water freezes and turns to ice, which alludes to the Olympic’s discipline of figure skating. The artist’s typical fragmented, oddly disproportionate images we can see here, combined and overlapped, create visual stories that associate us on the woman’s motions on the ice. A splintered face of a woman is shown upside down and crosswise over splintered red lines and blue accents the woman’s eyes and scattered dots in the background that symbolize the snowflakes. The woman’s skin is bright and shines as the ice, and behind her face and the red decorations are spiral lines that refer to the ice skates tracks.
