James Rosenquist’s painting "Little Welcome to the Waterplanet II" forms part of his ambitious "Welcome to the Water Planet" project, a distinguished series of large-scale prints, collages and paintings created between 1987 and 1989. The imagery balances realism with kaleidoscopic abstraction, a combination that is characteristic of Rosenquist’s artistic language as a whole.

The motif offered at auction exists in a number of different versions, including the considerably larger oil on canvas Welcome to the Water Planet II, measuring an impressive 254 x 167.6 cm and also executed in 1987. It was preceded by a charcoal study on paper and a colour study executed in mixed media and collage. The latter remains in The Collection of the Estate of James Rosenquist. This working process was central to Rosenquist’s practice: he prepared his paintings through extensive sketching and experimentation, allowing him to arrive at the strongest possible composition and to develop a clear sense of what he wished to create and convey through the finished work.

The title of the series may recall the name of a science-fiction film, but naturally refers to planet Earth, our home and the only known planet with liquid water. In the series, Rosenquist examines the Earth from new perspectives, as seen from outer space. He imagines how the world might appear through the eyes of visiting extraterrestrials. The result is a delicate balance between the planet’s natural beauty and the threats posed by human consumption, pollution and ecological destruction.

As early as Rosenquist’s formative works, which depicted the remnants of an expanding consumer culture, he explored his concerns about the future fate of both humanity and the natural world. His compositions present lush, flourishing landscapes that are simultaneously threatened by scientific and technological development. Detailed images of beautiful exotic flowers are frequently combined with the visual language of advertising and fragmented, objectified human bodies. Surreal plants appear alongside dark star-filled skies and distant nebulae, while beautiful female faces emerge through what resemble cut-out openings or tears in the canvas. Through his highly personal visual language, Rosenquist succeeds in uniting the beauty of the human figure and that of the flower without ever allowing the result to become clichéd.