Description
Titled “Rosie’s Diner #5″ this reproduction print was originally painted by Robert Gniewek. The iconic Rosie’s diner is featured front and center in back and white. The restaurants name is illuminated in red, along with a bright red vintage car sitting in front. Other vintage cars are parked out front of the diner as well, but only one is in full colour. A white top mat sits above the print and it is framed in a 2″ flat black moulding. Rosie’s Diner is located in Cedar Springs, Michigan. The dining car originally opened during the 1940s in Little Ferry, New Jersey, as the Silver Dollar Diner. After multiple commercials were filmed in the diner for Bounty paper towels with a fictional character named Rosie the Waitress, the diner was renamed Rosie’s. Previously offered to the Smithsonian Institution, the restaurant was sold in the 1990s to a Michigan artist who had the building moved to its current location next to another diner. A third diner was later moved to the site from Fulton, New York. A series of replicas were built as part of a chain of restaurants in the Denver area.
About the Artist: Considered a second-generation photorealist painter, Robert Gniewek paints scenes of mid-century American roadside culture and contemporary cityscapes. Using three or four photographic images of his subjects, Gniewek meticulously produces large-scale paintings of diners, movie theaters, motels, gas stations, cafes, and urban vistas—usually in his native Detroit. Like Robert Cottingham and Ron Kleemann before him, Gniewek shares a love of American signs of the 1940s and ’50s, though as the member of a younger generation he sometimes portrays them as neglected and time-worn, expressing nostalgia for a bygone era.
Dimensions: H29.5″ x W37.5”
