American painter, sculptor and commercial designer. He studied at the Cooper Union in New York between 1956 and 1959, where he was encouraged to take up painting as a career. Selecting the human figure as his thematic support, Wesselmann began producing small collages with torn paper and other waste material. These works and some gigantic still lifes made up of household items and glued fragments of adverts, brought him fame and the recognition of being a founder of American Pop Art. In 1967, he took part in the Venice Biennale and, in 1968 and 1977, in documenta 4 and 6 in Kassel. At the end of the 60s, his works began to have more erotic connotations as in Bedroom Painting #13 (1969). The pictorial features, exaggerated in arabesque forms and chromatic arbitrariness, became significantly greater in the 70s, and in the 80s he returned to wall works. Wesselmann is also an important and innovative commercial designer, adapting his imagery to lithographs, prints and aquatints. He had a major retrospective in Japan in 1993-94.
