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Extended through September 27, 2014

Ed Ruscha

Prints and Photographs

May 8–September 27, 2014
980 Madison Avenue, New York

Installation view Artwork © Ed Ruscha. Photo: Rob McKeever

Installation view

Artwork © Ed Ruscha. Photo: Rob McKeever

Installation view Artwork © Ed Ruscha. Photo: Rob McKeever

Installation view

Artwork © Ed Ruscha. Photo: Rob McKeever

Installation view Artwork © Ed Ruscha. Photo: Rob McKeever

Installation view

Artwork © Ed Ruscha. Photo: Rob McKeever

Installation view Artwork © Ed Ruscha. Photo: Rob McKeever

Installation view

Artwork © Ed Ruscha. Photo: Rob McKeever

Installation view Artwork © Ed Ruscha. Photo: Rob McKeever

Installation view

Artwork © Ed Ruscha. Photo: Rob McKeever

Installation view Artwork © Ed Ruscha. Photo: Rob McKeever

Installation view

Artwork © Ed Ruscha. Photo: Rob McKeever

Installation view Artwork © Ed Ruscha. Photo: Rob McKeever

Installation view

Artwork © Ed Ruscha. Photo: Rob McKeever

Installation view Artwork © Ed Ruscha. Photo: Rob McKeever

Installation view

Artwork © Ed Ruscha. Photo: Rob McKeever

Installation view Artwork © Ed Ruscha. Photo: Rob McKeever

Installation view

Artwork © Ed Ruscha. Photo: Rob McKeever

Installation video Play Button

Installation video

Installation view Artwork © Ed Ruscha. Photo: Rob McKeever

Installation view

Artwork © Ed Ruscha. Photo: Rob McKeever

Works Exhibited

Ed Ruscha, That Was Then This Is Now, 2014 Lithograph, 35 ½ × 46 inches (87.5 × 116.8 cm), edition of 75© Ed Ruscha

Ed Ruscha, That Was Then This Is Now, 2014

Lithograph, 35 ½ × 46 inches (87.5 × 116.8 cm), edition of 75
© Ed Ruscha

Ed Ruscha, Periods, 2013 Lithograph, 28 ¾ × 28 inches (73 × 71.1 cm), edition of 60© Ed Ruscha

Ed Ruscha, Periods, 2013

Lithograph, 28 ¾ × 28 inches (73 × 71.1 cm), edition of 60
© Ed Ruscha

Ed Ruscha, Cold Beer Beautiful Girls, 2009 3-color lithograph, 40 ½ × 30 ½ inches (102.9 × 77.5 cm), edition of 60© Ed Ruscha

Ed Ruscha, Cold Beer Beautiful Girls, 2009

3-color lithograph, 40 ½ × 30 ½ inches (102.9 × 77.5 cm), edition of 60
© Ed Ruscha

About

This exhibition, organized by Gagosian director Bob Monk, surveys Ruscha’s prints of the past forty years, together with rarely seen photographs produced since 1959.

Ranging freely and dexterously across traditional, unconventional, and sometimes even comestible materials, Ruscha’s prints are a fluid forum for the spirited investigation of what a limited-edition artwork can be. His absorption and rethinking of the requirements of each graphic procedure and format result in step-by-step transformations, in a process that echoes the eternal return of the subjects that make up his broader oeuvre. Ruscha arrived in Los Angeles in 1956 to study commercial art at the Chouinard Art Institute (now CalArts), and underwent a six-month apprenticeship with a printer beginning in 1958. Attracted to the reproducibility, collaborative processes, and happy accidents specific to printmaking, he began to create a wealth of lithographic editions, infusing the Pop and Conceptual sensibilities of the time with vernacular wit and melancholy. His exquisitely refined prints engage a breadth of formal themes, from text and typography to still life and quotidian architecture, played out in a spirit of rigorous yet restless experimentation.

The quartet of gas stations Standard Station, Mocha Standard, Cheese Mold Standard with Olive, and Double Standard (1966–69) merge Euclidean space with Renaissance perspective and wordplay, while depictions of the Hollywood sign and its surrounding hills convey an attitude to the region’s landscape, at once scientific and romantic, natural and artificial. In Hollywood in the Rain (1969), the monumental sign forms part of a linear landscape in the style of early topographic illustrations, while the lithographic series Landmark Decay and Further Landmark Decay (2006) depict the letters in various stages of collapse. “‘Hollywood’ is like a verb to me,” Ruscha once said. “It’s something you can do to any subject or any thing.” Parallel to his output of paintings and drawings, Ruscha’s prints of the past four decades are random yet refined expressions of this unrestricted approach.

In the portfolio of screenprints News, Mews, Pews, Brews, Stews, Dues (1970), produced at Editions Alecto, London, rhyming words appear in Gothic typeface, printed in edible substances such as pie fillings, bolognese sauce, caviar, and chocolate syrup. Each word alludes to Ruscha’s impressions of England: News symbolizes “a tabloid-minded country,” while Stews—made from baked beans, strawberries, chutney, and other foodstuffs—sums up British cooking.

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Black-and-white photograph: Donald Marron, c. 1984.

Donald Marron

Jacoba Urist profiles the legendary collector.

Alexander Calder poster for McGovern, 1972, lithograph

The Art History of Presidential Campaign Posters

Against the backdrop of the 2020 US presidential election, historian Hal Wert takes us through the artistic and political evolution of American campaign posters, from their origin in 1844 to the present. In an interview with Quarterly editor Gillian Jakab, Wert highlights an array of landmark posters and the artists who made them.

Ed Ruscha, At That, 2020, dry pigment and acrylic on paper.

“Things Fall Apart”: Ed Ruscha’s Swiped Words

Lisa Turvey examines the range of effects conveyed by the blurred phrases in recent drawings by the artist, detailing the ways these words in motion evoke the experience of the current moment.

Andy Warhol cover design for the magazine Aspen 1, no. 3.

Artists’ Magazines

Gwen Allen recounts her discovery of cutting-edge artists’ magazines from the 1960s and 1970s and explores the roots and implications of these singular publications.

A painting with gold frame by Louis Michel Eilshemius. Landscape with single figure.

Eilshemius and Me: An Interview with Ed Ruscha

Ed Ruscha tells Viet-Nu Nguyen and Leta Grzan how he first encountered Louis Michel Eilshemius’s paintings, which of the artist’s aesthetic innovations captured his imagination, and how his own work relates to and differs from that of this “Neglected Marvel.”

River Café menu with illustration by Ed Ruscha.

The River Café Cookbook

London’s River Café, a culinary mecca perched on a bend in the River Thames, celebrated its thirtieth anniversary in 2018. To celebrate this milestone and the publication of her cookbook River Café London, cofounder Ruth Rogers sat down with Derek Blasberg to discuss the famed restaurant’s allure.

News

Photo: Kate Simon

Artist Spotlight

Ed Ruscha

September 16–22, 2020

At the start of his artistic career, Ed Ruscha called himself an “abstract artist . . . who deals with subject matter.” Abandoning academic connotations that came to be associated with Abstract Expressionism, he looked instead to tropes of advertising and brought words—as form, symbol, and material—to the forefront of painting. Working in diverse media with humor and wit, he oscillates between sign and substance, locating the sublime in landscapes both natural and artificial. Ruscha’s formal experimentations and clever use of the American vernacular have evolved in form and meaning as technology alters the essence of human communication.

Photo: Kate Simon

Installation view, Ed Ruscha: Drum Skins, Blanton Museum of Art, University of Texas at Austin, January 11–October 4, 2020. Artwork © Ed Ruscha

galleryplatform.la

Ed Ruscha
Drum Skins

May 28–June 30, 2020

Gagosian is pleased to present recent paintings by Ed Ruscha online for galleryplatform.laFifty years ago, Ruscha purchased a set of vellum drum skins from a leather shop in Los Angeles. He has continued to collect these vintage objects, and since 2011 he has used them as canvases for the works on view in his solo exhibition Drum Skins at the Blanton Museum of Art at the University of Texas at Austin. 

Installation view, Ed Ruscha: Drum Skins, Blanton Museum of Art, University of Texas at Austin, January 11–October 4, 2020. Artwork © Ed Ruscha