Harper’s is pleased to announce JJ Manford + James Rosenquist, a two-person exhibition featuring new works by JJ Manford alongside selections from the Gift Wrapped Doll series, a little-known body of work produced by James Rosenquist in the early 1990s. The exhibition opens Thursday, April 9, 6–8pm, with a reception attended by Manford.
Across distinct visual languages, both painters draw on artifacts from popular culture as central themes. Manford constructs vibrant domestic interiors populated with a range of products from “high” and “low” sources, as if furnished by a worldly collector whose voracious appetite collapses disparate references into a single, compressed space. Similarly, Rosenquist is best known for billboard-scale paintings that splice together tropes from advertising and mass media, collapsing distinctions between art and kitsch. Here, in the Gift Wrapped Doll series, the artist monumentalizes a commodity object, still wrapped in its cellophane, as a magnified optical field, drawing the viewer into an intensified encounter with the doll heads themselves.
While both Manford and Rosenquist share similar starting points in their subject matter, their formal approaches diverge significantly. Manford foregrounds the materiality of his surfaces, from the dense accumulations of oil stick to the toothy weave of his coarsely threaded canvases. Given the quilt-like construction of his imagined interiors—filled with ornate rugs, wallpaper, and stained glass panels—the tactility of his materials and layered patterns lend the paintings a tapestry-like quality. Rosenquist’s surfaces, by contrast, are highly finished with a slick, industrial polish. His brushwork is mechanically precise, with crisply defined edges that mimic the pristine, newly manufactured appearance of commercial products. His soft treatment of the synthetic skin of the doll heads, along with the glistening refractions across the iridescent film encasing them, suggest the staged allure of product photography.
Yet both artists share a proclivity toward heightened chroma and a surrealist edge. Manford’s compositions take greater liberties with spatial coherence, assembling convergent rooms that resist resolution into a singular environment. His deadpan handling and single-point perspective are often disrupted by overwhelming patterns and vignetted scenes within scenes. Similarly, Rosenquist’s doll faces are at once direct and estranged, their enlarged features drawing in the viewer while remaining distanced by their synthetic surfaces. The plastic packaging that engulfs them reads simultaneously as display and suffocation, resulting in an uneasy intimacy in which protection and smothering collapse into the same image.
Viewed together, Manford’s interiors and Rosenquist’s close-ups trace a shared concern with surrogate figures and manufactured desire—the collectible on a shelf and the doll behind cellophane—where the domestic and commercial give way to a singular spectacle that shapes everyday life. In this way, both Manford and Rosenquist engage with motifs drawn from popular culture not as passive reference, but as a means of revealing how such imagery mediates lived experience.
JJ Manford (b. 1983, Boston, MA) received a BFA from Cornell University in 2006, a post-baccalaureate certificate from School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2009, and an MFA from Hunter College in 2013. Most recently, his work has been the subject of solo presentations at Nazarian / Curcio, Los Angeles (2025); V1 Gallery, Copenhagen (2024); Galería Marta Cervera, Madrid (2024); Derek Eller Gallery, New York (2024, 2021, and 2019); Berggruen Gallery, San Francisco (2023); Harper’s, Los Angeles and East Hampton (2023, 2022 and 2021); and John Davis Gallery, Hudson, NY (2016 and 2012). Manford has participated in group exhibitions at König Galerie, Munich (2025); V1 Gallery, Copenhagen (2025); F2T Gallery, Milan (2024); Harper’s, Los Angeles (2023 and 2021); KDR305, Miami (2023); The Hole, New York and Los Angeles (2022); Berggruen Gallery, San Francisco (2022); and The Pit, Glendale and Palm Springs, CA (2022 and 2021), among other venues. A catalog, Greenport Magic, accompanied an exhibition of the same title at Arts + Leisure Gallery, New York, in 2017; in 2024, Harper’s and Derek Eller Gallery co-published a survey of Manford’s paintings. Reviews of his work have appeared in numerous publications, including Artforum, New Yorker, and KCRW Art Insider. Manford lives and works in Brooklyn.
A titan of the Pop Art era, James Rosenquist (b. 1933, Grand Forks, ND; d. 2017, New York, NY) began his career as a commercial sign painter, a practice he pursued while studying at University of Minnesota, and after moving to New York City in 1955, the Arts Students League. Major retrospectives took place at institutions including Museum Ludwig, Cologne (2017); Museum of Modern Art, New York (2012); Guggenheim Bilbao, ES (2005); and Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (2003). Highlights of Rosenquist’s early and mid-career include presentations at San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco (1979); Centre George Pompidou, Paris (1977); Albright-Knox Gallery, Buffalo (1974); Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (1973); Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (1972); Leo Castelli Gallery, New York (1965); and Green Gallery, New York (1962). Rosenquist’s works are held in public collections worldwide, notably Centre Georges Pompidou, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt, National Gallery of Canada, Tate Modern, and Whitney Museum of American Art.