James Rosenquist is one of the most important first generation Pop artists to emerge in the early 1960's, and F-111 is among the most important, defining and iconic works/images of the Pop Art era, and post-war and contemporary art in general. The stream of imagery and four individual panels of the work are united and underscored visually by the image of an F-111 fighter jet. The proposed F-111 fighter project was a controversial initiative at the time, one that was ultimately scrapped without producing any aircraft. Conceptually, the work's imagery reflects a wide range of industries that have driven and continue to factor heavily in tothe U.S. and global economy and markets... automotive, aerospace, military, manufacturing, energy, food production and service etc. Like fellow Pop artists Andy Warhol, Claes Oldenburg and Roy Lichtenstein, Rosenquist has employed the catchy color, style, and visual exaggeration of advertising, consumer product packaging and the mass media. The ambitious scale of the print and the painting of the same title that preceded it was facilitated and heavily influenced by Rosenquist's early career experience as a billboard painter. F-111 the painting, which resides in the collection of New York's Museum of Modern Art, was executed in 1965, and consists of four massive billboard sized panels; arranged tip-to-tail in a continuous sequence, the painting measures approximately 86 feet in length. Nine years after completing the painting, Rosenquist recast F-111 as an editioned print. Measuring approximately 26 feet in length, the piece ranks among the more ambitious printmaking efforts in recent history. In translating F-111’s imagery to printmaking Rosenquist opted to shift the sequence or registration of the images, so that the four panels that comprise the print are not visually congruent with the four panels of the painting.

F-111 can be installed in a variety of ways. Ideally, the work's north, south, east and west panels get hung on four corresponding north, south, east and west walls in the same room. Given the difficulty of accomplishing that in a most domestic settings hard to do, the piece can be installed in several ways... four walls in the same room; in a continuous linear sequence, bent around a corner on two or more walls etc.