'To enter the corridor of collage studies at Thaddaeus Ropac is to watch the systematic unveiling of a 1960s American visual sensibility. Coupled with a series of painted montages, scaled up to test the viewer’s tolerance for auratic seduction, this exhibition reveals something of the mind behind James Rosenquist’s ‘surreal movie’. Initially a commercial billboard painter in his native Minneapolis, Rosenquist continued his practice in Times Square after arriving in New York in 1955 to study at the Art Students League. Examining the preparatory ‘ideograms’ on display here – including the source for I Love you with My Ford (1961), with its matrix of grid lines overlaying a sumptuous red Crestline – reveals the workings of a mind trained to magnify all-over experience.'

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