Ed Ruscha, Photo: © Style Magazine

Ed Ruscha. Photo: Manfredi Gioacchini

 

Ed Ruscha (*1937) is one of the most eminent and influential postwar American artists and a pioneer of Pop and conceptual Art. At the core of his iconic oeuvre including painting and drawing, photography, film and artist’s books, is the combination of text and image. The California-based artist’s work takes playful aim at visual and linguistic clichés of popular culture, dismantling our accustomed ways of seeing to reveal flashes of beauty and sublimity in the seemingly banal.

 

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Ruscha’s painterly oeuvre derives from a perpetual expansion of the medium’s boundaries, often with recourse to visual strategies from advertising, graphic design and film. Early paintings from the first half of the 1960s show the artist breaking with Abstract Expressionism’s dogma of subjectivity to foreground ubiquitous brand logos or product packaging instead. Emphatically horizontal works including Large Trademark with Eight Spotlights (1962)—a monumental, deeply elongated rendering of the Twentieth-Century Fox logo—explore notions of landscape and the American West and recall widescreen CinemaScope film projections.

But the hallmark of his painting practice would soon be the incorporation of words and lettering, often in isolation against monochrome or graded color backgrounds. Works including OOF (1962) or Hollywood (1968) document shifts in the semiotic topography of their time and its cacophonous linguistic repertoire. Ruscha’s jarring use of text severed from its everyday context goes beyond reinventing the picture plane as a place for juxtaposing imagery and language. The conceptual space he creates also frees words from their overdetermined use in the media and everyday life, leaving them open to new associations in the mind of the viewer.

Much of the artist’s work since the 1970s involves a new type of picture that combines the illusory depth of landscape painting with the flat space of typography. At the center of these works are familiar-sounding, often tongue-in-cheek phrases and short sentences that could be described as “readymade” language from media, music, literature and advertising. Since the 1980s, these words have almost always appeared in a plain, functional font that Ruscha designed himself and ironically refers to as Boy Scout Utility Modern. The backgrounds of these works usually consist in sections of sky, nocturnal cityscapes or snowy mountain peaks—almost generic-looking images that nevertheless exude a kind of dim majesty. While paintings such as Not a Bad World, Is It? (1984) or Daily Planet (2003) seem to try to secularize transcendental emotions, others including his The End series (ongoing since 1991) engage with social and societal decay.

Ruscha’s output also includes highly influential artist’s books featuring his own photographs, most prominently Twentysix Gasoline Stations (1963) and Some Los Angeles Apartments (1965). The images collected in these publications also formed the basis for many of his immensely skillful, luminous drawings—works-on-paper for which the artist uses cotton pads and Q-tips to deftly apply gunpowder and ground pastels to rag paper. He has also experimented with such unconventional drawing media as the American medicine Pepto-Bismol, hot sauce, blood, fruit and vegetable juices, egg yolks, grass, caviar, chocolate or rose petals, and with supports including silk, satin or moire.

With visual elegance and a great deal of humor, Ruscha’s work shifts focus to what might be called the background noise of popular culture: to that which has become so ordinary as to escape notice, to what the artist himself once described as cultural “detritus.” His subtly anarchic approach reshuffles the codes that define our relationship to the present, injecting freedom into our usual habits of perception.

 

 

 

Ed Ruscha: Words Have No Size
Ed Ruscha interviewed by Marc-Christoph Wagner at his studio in Los Angeles in January 2016.
© Louisiana Channel, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk, 2016

Works
Ed Ruscha
Ed Ruscha
Untitled (Many Signs), 2004

Ed Ruscha
Untitled (Many Signs), 2004
Acrylic on canvas
122 × 244 cm
48 × 96 inches

Ed Ruscha
Ed Ruscha
Gator, 2014

Ed Ruscha
Gator, 2014
Acrylic on canvas
61 × 116.8 cm
24 × 46 inches

Ed Ruscha
Ed Ruscha
Metro Mattress #4, 2015

Ed Ruscha
Metro Mattress #4, 2015
Acrylic and pencil on museum board paper
102 × 152.5 cm
40 1/8 × 60 inches

More views
Ed Ruscha
Ed Ruscha
American Tool Supply, 2001

Ed Ruscha
American Tool Supply, 2001
Acrylic on canvas
208.3 × 304.8 cm
82 × 120 inches

Ed Ruscha
Ed Ruscha
Houston to Miami, 1999

Ed Ruscha
Houston to Miami, 1999
Acrylic on canvas
137.2 × 304.8 cm
54 × 120 inches

More views
Ed Ruscha
Ed Ruscha
Woman on Fire, 1990

Ed Ruscha
Woman on Fire, 1990
Acrylic on canvas
91.4 × 121.9 cm
36 1/8 × 48 inches

Ed Ruscha
Ed Ruscha
The End #28, 2003

Ed Ruscha
The End #28, 2003
Acrylic and ink on paper
61 × 76.2 cm
24 × 30 inches

Ed Ruscha
Ed Ruscha
Stress, 1983

Ed Ruscha
Stress, 1983
Oil on canvas
228.6 × 335.3 cm
90 × 132 inches

More views
Ed Ruscha
Ed Ruscha
She Didn't Have to Do That, 1974

Ed Ruscha
She Didn't Have to Do That, 1974
Blood on satin
91.4 × 101.6 cm
36 × 40 inches

More views
Ed Ruscha
Ed Ruscha
Era Ends, 1986

Ed Ruscha
Era Ends, 1986
Oil and enamel on canvas
162.6 × 162.6 cm
64 × 64 inches

Ed Ruscha
Ed Ruscha
Hurry up schedule, 2002

Ed Ruscha
Hurry up schedule, 2002
Acrylic on canvas
137 × 153 cm
54 × 60 1/4 inches

Ed Ruscha
Ed Ruscha
Devil or Angel, 1973

Ed Ruscha
Devil or Angel, 1973
Red cabbage on canvas
137.2 × 152.4 cm
54 × 60 inches

Ed Ruscha
Ed Ruscha
Hollywood, 1968

Ed Ruscha
Hollywood, 1968
Gouache and silkscreen on paper
31.4 × 103.8 cm
12 3/8 × 40 7/8 inches

Ed Ruscha
Ed Ruscha
Whiskers, 1972

Ed Ruscha
Whiskers, 1972
Gunpowder and pastel on paper
29.2 × 73.6 cm
11 1/2 × 29 inches

Details
Ed Ruscha

Ed Ruscha
Untitled (Many Signs), 2004
Acrylic on canvas
122 × 244 cm
48 × 96 inches

Ed Ruscha
Untitled (Many Signs), 2004
Ed Ruscha

Ed Ruscha
Gator, 2014
Acrylic on canvas
61 × 116.8 cm
24 × 46 inches

Ed Ruscha
Gator, 2014
Ed Ruscha

Ed Ruscha
Metro Mattress #4, 2015
Acrylic and pencil on museum board paper
102 × 152.5 cm
40 1/8 × 60 inches

Ed Ruscha
Metro Mattress #4, 2015
Ed Ruscha
Ed Ruscha

Ed Ruscha
Metro Mattress #4, 2015 (detail)

Ed Ruscha
Metro Mattress #4, 2015
Ed Ruscha

Ed Ruscha
American Tool Supply, 2001
Acrylic on canvas
208.3 × 304.8 cm
82 × 120 inches

Ed Ruscha
American Tool Supply, 2001
Ed Ruscha

Ed Ruscha
Houston to Miami, 1999
Acrylic on canvas
137.2 × 304.8 cm
54 × 120 inches

Ed Ruscha
Houston to Miami, 1999
Ed Ruscha
Ed Ruscha

Ed Ruscha
Houston to Miami, 1999 (detail)

Ed Ruscha
Houston to Miami, 1999
Ed Ruscha
Ed Ruscha

Ed Ruscha
Houston to Miami, 1999 (detail)

Ed Ruscha
Houston to Miami, 1999
Ed Ruscha

Ed Ruscha
Woman on Fire, 1990
Acrylic on canvas
91.4 × 121.9 cm
36 1/8 × 48 inches

Ed Ruscha
Woman on Fire, 1990
Ed Ruscha

Ed Ruscha
The End #28, 2003
Acrylic and ink on paper
61 × 76.2 cm
24 × 30 inches

Ed Ruscha
The End #28, 2003
Ed Ruscha

Ed Ruscha
Stress, 1983
Oil on canvas
228.6 × 335.3 cm
90 × 132 inches

Ed Ruscha
Stress, 1983
Ed Ruscha
Ed Ruscha

Ed Ruscha
Stress (Dean no. P1983.17), 1983 (detail)

Ed Ruscha
Stress (Dean no. P1983.17), 1983
Ed Ruscha
Ed Ruscha

Ed Ruscha
Stress (Dean no. P1983.17), 1983 (detail)

Ed Ruscha
Stress (Dean no. P1983.17), 1983
Ed Ruscha
Ed Ruscha

Ed Ruscha
Stress (Dean no. P1983.17), 1983 (detail)

Ed Ruscha
Stress (Dean no. P1983.17), 1983
Ed Ruscha

Ed Ruscha
She Didn't Have to Do That, 1974
Blood on satin
91.4 × 101.6 cm
36 × 40 inches

Ed Ruscha
She Didn't Have to Do That, 1974
Ed Ruscha
Ed Ruscha

Ed Ruscha
She Didn't Have to Do That, 1974 (detail)

Ed Ruscha
She Didn't Have to Do That, 1974
Ed Ruscha
Ed Ruscha

Ed Ruscha
She Didn't Have to Do That, 1974 (detail)

Ed Ruscha
She Didn't Have to Do That, 1974
Ed Ruscha
Ed Ruscha

Ed Ruscha
She Didn't Have to Do That, 1974 (detail)

Ed Ruscha
She Didn't Have to Do That, 1974
Ed Ruscha

Ed Ruscha
Era Ends, 1986
Oil and enamel on canvas
162.6 × 162.6 cm
64 × 64 inches

Ed Ruscha
Era Ends, 1986
Ed Ruscha

Ed Ruscha
Hurry up schedule, 2002
Acrylic on canvas
137 × 153 cm
54 × 60 1/4 inches

Ed Ruscha
Hurry up schedule, 2002
Ed Ruscha

Ed Ruscha
Devil or Angel, 1973
Red cabbage on canvas
137.2 × 152.4 cm
54 × 60 inches

Ed Ruscha
Devil or Angel, 1973
Ed Ruscha

Ed Ruscha
Hollywood, 1968
Gouache and silkscreen on paper
31.4 × 103.8 cm
12 3/8 × 40 7/8 inches

Ed Ruscha
Hollywood, 1968
Ed Ruscha

Ed Ruscha
Whiskers, 1972
Gunpowder and pastel on paper
29.2 × 73.6 cm
11 1/2 × 29 inches

Ed Ruscha
Whiskers, 1972
Details
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Current and Upcoming
Ed Ruscha
John Baldessari, Buildings=Guns=People: Desire, Knowledge, And Hope (With Smog), 1986. Courtesy the Broad

Desire, Knowledge, and Hope (With Smog).
Group Exhibition
The Broad, Los Angeles
Through April 7, 2024

The Broad is pleased to announce Desire, Knowledge, and Hope (with Smog), an exhibition drawn entirely from the Broad collection, showcasing works by Los Angeles based-artists. Drawing its title from a John Baldessari work, the exhibition includes reflections on L.A. as a city in flux and turmoil, and on societal issues that extend far beyond the city. Originally the exhibition was a Spring 2020 show poised to open when the COVID-19 pandemic emerged, leaving the project unrealized. Now re-envisioned, Desire, Knowledge, and Hope (with Smog) mines the paradoxes captured in Baldessari’s title through a more expansive, post-2020 lens featuring a wider spectrum of LA-based artists and practices in the evolving Broad collection.

Link

Five Ways In: Themes from the Collection
Group Exhibition
The Walker Art Center, Minneapolis
Through May 5, 2024

The Walker’s newest collection exhibition is organized by five familiar themes: portraiture, the interior scene, landscape, still life, and abstraction. Each of these areas features a diverse range of artists whose approaches to their subjects are often unconventional, innovative, and even surprising.
With more than 100 works—painting, sculpture, drawing, photography, and video installations—the exhibition Five Ways In: Themes from the Collection invites us to become reacquainted with favorites from the collection and discover new pieces by artists who are reinventing genres we thought we knew.

Link
Ed Ruscha
Five Ways In: Themes from the Collection, installation view, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, February 14, 2019–September 19, 2021. Photo by Bobby Rogers, courtesy of the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis
Ed Ruscha
Ed Ruscha, Standard Station, 1966
© Ed Ruscha, 2024
 

Ed Ruscha
ED RUSCHA / NOW THEN
Los Angeles County Museum of Art – LACMA
April 7–October 6, 2024

Ed Ruscha has consistently held up a mirror to American society by transforming some of its defining attributes – from consumer culture and popular entertainment to the ever-changing urban landscape – into the very subject of his art. In 1956, Ruscha left Oklahoma City to study commercial art in Los Angeles, where he drew inspiration from the city’s architectural landscape – parking lots, urban streets, and apartment buildings – and colloquial language.

As his first comprehensive, cross-media retrospective in over 20 years, ED RUSCHA / NOW THEN traces Ruscha’s methods and familiar subjects throughout his career and underscores the many remarkable contributions he has made well beyond the boundaries of the art world. The exhibition includes his early works produced while traveling through Europe, his installations – such as the Chocolate Room and the Course of Empire presented at the Venice Biennale in 1970 and 2005, respectively – and his ceaseless photographic documentation of the streets of Los Angeles beginning in 1965.

Link
Exhibitions at Sprüth Magers
Ed Ruscha

Ed Ruscha
Metro Mattresses
November 3, 2015–January 16, 2016
Berlin

"The mattresses become not just litter in the landscape but more like scary animals."
– Ed Ruscha

Ed Ruscha has been casting his eye across the landscapes of the American west for over 50 years, taking in everything from gas stations to swimming pools to sublime mountain ranges. With their clarity and deadpan wit, his photographs, drawings and paintings impart a mood of playful awe on everyday monuments. The motifs for his new series Metro Mattresses were found, like so many of the subjects of his work, on the streets of Los Angeles.

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Ed Ruscha

Source Codes
Kenneth Anger, Richard Artschwager, John Baldessari, Bruce Conner, Richard Hamilton, David Lamelas, Richard Prince, Ed Ruscha, Lucas Samaras, John Stezaker, Paul Thek
June 26–August 29, 2009
Berlin

Source Codes juxtaposes a selection of works by a number of artists and filmmakers from Europe and America who mapped essential conceptual groundwork in the 1960s and 1970s and whose work remains influential to many artists today By examining new ways to rethink and translate visual information and cultural codes in the gaps between Minimalism and Pop Art, and through an interest in process-based performative practice, their work has exerted significant influence on younger artists in a variety of ways.

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Shadow and Light
Richard Artschwager, John Baldessari, Matthew Barney, George Condo, Walter Dahn, Olafur Eliasson, Martin Fengel, Peter Fischli David Weiss, Dan Flavin, Sylvie Fleury, Gilbert & George, Dan Graham, Thomas Grünfeld, Andreas Gursky, Stefan Hirsig, Jenny Holzer, Axel Kasseböhmer, Stefan Kern, Karen Kilimnik, Astrid Klein, Louise Lawler, Anne Loch, Paul Morrison, Jean-Luc Mylayne, Bruce Nauman, Manuel Ocampo, Nam June Paik, Hirsch Perlman, Lari Pittman, Barbara Probst, Gerhard Richter, Ed Ruscha, Robert Ryman, Frances Scholz, Andreas Schulze, Cindy Sherman, Paul Sietsema, Rosemarie Trockel, Kara Walker, Andy Warhol, Christopher Wool, Martin Wöhrl, Philip-Lorca diCorcia
July 26–August 31, 2003
Salzburg

Monika Sprüth and Philomene Magers will open a temporary space in Salzburg together with their London partner Simon Lee for the duration of the Salzburg Festival. One of the main reasons for this was the fact that the galleries are traditionally closed in August and that exhibition operations are shut down, but at the same time cultural life is at its peak in Salzburg, not far from our Munich location. It makes sense to contribute something to the cultural climate with a precisely formulated group exhibition and at the same time to reach a sophisticated international audience.

Ed Ruscha
Ed Ruscha

20th Anniversary Show
John Baldessari, Alighiero Boetti, George Condo, Walter Dahn, Thomas Demand, Thea Djordjadze, Peter Fischli David Weiss, Sylvie Fleury, Andreas Gursky, Jenny Holzer, Gary Hume, Axel Kasseböhmer, Karen Kilimnik, Astrid Klein, Barbara Kruger, Louise Lawler, Jean-Luc Mylayne, Nina Pohl, Richard Prince, Ed Ruscha, Frances Scholz, Andreas Schulze, Cindy Sherman, Rosemarie Trockel, Andrea Zittel, Philip-Lorca diCorcia
April 25–October 18, 2003
Cologne

In 1983, Monika Sprüth opened her Cologne based gallery with a solo show by Andreas Schulze. Starting from the idea to establish a forum for young and unknown artists, the central focus of the gallery concept was developed in the discourse of the 80s. The gallery program was completed by recourses to artistic attitudes of the last 40 years. This research, motivated by reflection on contemporary art history, was more and more realized in cooperation with Philomene Magers who directed her Bonn gallery since 1992. After a few years of loose cooperation, Monika Sprüth Gallery and Philomene Magers Gallery aligned with each other after, and together the Monika Sprüth / Philomene Magers Gallery opened up in Munich in 1999.

Ed Ruscha
With and Without Words
October 31, 2002–February 28, 2003
Cologne

Ed Ruscha is one of the first Americans to criticize the mechanisms and means of pop culture in his work by making use of its means and visual language. In this way, he also paid homage to precisely these visual languages, on whose effectiveness and recognition effect he could and can rely. Furthermore, he is one of the protagonists in relation to the examination of language in the visual arts, as is already explicitly stated in the title of the Munich exhibition, because pictures are exhibited "with and without words".

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Ed Ruscha
Ed Ruscha

Ed Ruscha
With and Without Words
September 13–October 19, 2002
Munich

"Hints of narrow pop culture meanings in conventionally insignificant elements and vice versa are the actual material (…) with which Ruscha deals with what has become classic and casual."
-Diederich Diederichsen

Monika Sprüth and Philomene Magers are pleased to present new pictures and works on paper by Ed Ruscha. He is one of the first Americans to criticize the mechanisms and means of pop culture in his work by making use of its means and visual language. In this way, he also paid homage to precisely these visual languages, on whose effectiveness and recognition effect he could and can rely.

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Ed Ruscha
Gunpowder and Stains
May 6–June 17, 2000
Munich

Lettering in pictures immediately raises the question as to what the rest of the picture is meant to be doing. If it were only a "blank page", it would after all not be a picture any more. That which in relationship only to a figure that could only express anything through its visual form must now also establish a relationship to a figure that consists both of a form – the typography – and of a code defined clearly by convention namely writing, which also has a relationship to this codedness. Are they merely carriers of a sign, perhaps, and thus purely servile? Or the residual representatives of the pictorial principle, and thus principally non-code, but also a non-blank page?

-Diedrich Diederichsen

Ed Ruscha
Press

Ed Ruscha: OKLA
Artdesk, article by Ryan Steadman with Louisa McCune, Winter 2021

Ed Ruscha Exhibit Examines the Artist’s Oklahoma Roots
Wall Street Journal, article by Kelly Crow, February 15, 2021

Ed Ruscha‘s stunning Sunset Strip art project lets you tour its full length, east to west – and back in time
The Washington Post, article by Sebastian Smee, January 9, 2021

Preserving The History Of LA’s Most Iconic Street
Getty Magazine, article by Erin Migdol, page 34, Fall 2020

Putting into words his Oklahoma roots
The New York Times International Edition, article by M.H.Miller, January 17, 2020

Colony of Errors: Ciarán Finlayson on Thomas Cole and Ed Ruscha
Artforum International, article by Ciarán Finlayson, November 3, 2018

Ed Ruscha Still Has Plenty More to Say About America
Vanity Fair, article by Mark Rozzo, May 30, 2018

“I am wide awake when I see artist books.”
The Believer, article by Stephanie LaCava, January 25, 2017

Ed Ruscha
Interview, interview by Sterling Ruby, September 7, 2016

Profiles: Ed Ruscha’s L.A.
The New Yorker, article by Calvin Tomkins, July 1, 2013 

Ed Ruscha: The Golden State
Art in America, article by Bob Monk, October 2011

Ed Ruscha’s Modern Language
Parkett, article by Howard Singerman, 1999

Biography

Ed Ruscha (*1937, Omaha, NE) lives and works in Los Angeles. Recent solo exhibitions include Museum of Modern Art, New York (2023), Oklahoma Contemporary, Oklahoma City (2021), Sonoma Valley Museum of Art (2021), Blanton Museum of Art, Austin (2020), Secession, Vienna (2019), National Gallery, London (2018), Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebaek (2018), KODE Art Museum and Composer Homes, Bergen (2018), de Young Museum, San Francisco (2016). His work has been the subject of numerous museum retrospectives, beginning in 1983 with the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (traveling to Whitney Museum of American Art, Vancouver Art Gallery, San Antonio Museum of Art, and Los Angeles County Museum of Art), Centre Georges Pompidou (1989), Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden (2000), and Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia (2001). In 2009, the major retrospective Ed Ruscha: Fifty Years of Painting opened at London's Hayward Gallery and traveled through Europe to Haus der Kunst, Munich, and Moderna Museet, Stockholm. Ruscha also represented the USA at the 51th Venice Biennale in 2005.