By the late 1970s, the American Pop painter James Rosenquist (1933-2017) had moved on from imagery sourced from advertising and consumer culture, shifting his focus to address complex geo-political, existential, and environmental themes. The Bird of Paradise Approaches the Hot Water Planet (Grisaille) belongs to a series Rosenquist produced in the late 1980s and early 1990s called Welcome to the Water Planet. Addressing issues pertaining to the deteriorating state of planet Earth, and the ecological impact of consumer culture and industrialization on the natural environment, the artist explained: “Just a handful of people recognize the ecology of our world, the oceans and so forth, and so these art works called Welcome to the Water Planet were comments on this delicacy of our ecology.”

In creating this series, Rosenquist was influenced by the vibrant flora visible from his studio in Aripeka, Florida. The top half of this painting suggests a shimmering, starry galaxy, while the bottom of the work features an encapsulating, botanical and aquatic-like form overlaid by a piercing set of female eyes, peering out from the spliced forms of a face which floats across the work in ribbon-like shapes. Interconnecting these images depicting natural and astronomical environments with human-like forms, Rosenquist emphasizes the threats posed by technology and industry on our increasingly vulnerable environment. The artist’s crosshatching technique lends itself to the division of his compositions into complex pictorial planes, which enables Rosenquist to address multiple themes simultaneously within one space. By splicing the canvas with shard-like configurations, indications of human interference allude to a mechanical age that, like the images, are often at odds with nature. The botanical imagery Rosenquist depicts here is both familiar and foreign, as if viewed from a perspective not entirely recognizable to humankind.