Menu

Extended through February 10, 2015

Ed Ruscha

Paintings

November 20, 2014–February 10, 2015
Rome

Installation view Artwork © Ed Ruscha. Photo: Matteo D’Eletto

Installation view

Artwork © Ed Ruscha. Photo: Matteo D’Eletto

Installation view Artwork © Ed Ruscha. Photo: Matteo D’Eletto

Installation view

Artwork © Ed Ruscha. Photo: Matteo D’Eletto

Installation view Artwork © Ed Ruscha. Photo: Matteo D’Eletto

Installation view

Artwork © Ed Ruscha. Photo: Matteo D’Eletto

Installation view Artwork © Ed Ruscha. Photo: Matteo D’Eletto

Installation view

Artwork © Ed Ruscha. Photo: Matteo D’Eletto

Works Exhibited

Ed Ruscha, Gal Chews Same Gum Since 1963, 2014 Acrylic on canvas, 30 × 40 inches (76.2 × 101.6 cm)© Ed Ruscha

Ed Ruscha, Gal Chews Same Gum Since 1963, 2014

Acrylic on canvas, 30 × 40 inches (76.2 × 101.6 cm)
© Ed Ruscha

Ed Ruscha, Bliss Bucket, 2014 Acrylic on canvas, 72 × 124 inches (182.9 × 315 cm)© Ed Ruscha

Ed Ruscha, Bliss Bucket, 2014

Acrylic on canvas, 72 × 124 inches (182.9 × 315 cm)
© Ed Ruscha

Ed Ruscha, Inner-City Make Scream, 2014 Acrylic on canvas, 40 × 50 inches (101.6 × 127 cm)© Ed Ruscha. Photo: Paul Ruscha

Ed Ruscha, Inner-City Make Scream, 2014

Acrylic on canvas, 40 × 50 inches (101.6 × 127 cm)
© Ed Ruscha. Photo: Paul Ruscha

Ed Ruscha, Psycho Spaghetti Western #14, 2013–14 Acrylic on canvas, 54 × 132 inches (137.2 × 335.3 cm)© Ed Ruscha

Ed Ruscha, Psycho Spaghetti Western #14, 2013–14

Acrylic on canvas, 54 × 132 inches (137.2 × 335.3 cm)
© Ed Ruscha

Ed Ruscha, Study for Psycho Spaghetti Western #4, 2010 Acrylic on canvas, 26 × 26 inches (66 × 66 cm)© Ed Ruscha

Ed Ruscha, Study for Psycho Spaghetti Western #4, 2010

Acrylic on canvas, 26 × 26 inches (66 × 66 cm)
© Ed Ruscha

About

Deterioration is a fertile area to explore.
—Ed Ruscha

Gagosian is pleased to present new paintings by Ed Ruscha.

In 2005, Ruscha represented the United States at the Biennale di Venezia with Course of Empire, a project inspired by five paintings by Thomas Cole that depict the same landscape over time as it transforms from a pristine natural state into developed terrain, and, finally, barren desolation. In the elegiac Psycho Spaghetti Westerns of 2011, he continued this train of thought, zooming in on the effects of time on the contemporary American landscape in a manner both empirical and metaphorically charged. He has described these finely nuanced exercises in perception and memory as “waste and retrieval.”

In these wide horizontal paintings, landscape became a mental construct of abutting abstract surfaces—one a sfumato backdrop, the other a representational ground (grass, scrub, rock). This structure—a strong diagonal cutting the picture plane and dividing background from foreground—is a pictorial device that Ruscha has often used, dating back as far as the Standard Station paintings of the 1960s. In the Psycho Spaghetti Westerns it provided a near neutral picture plane for meticulously rendered natures mortes of incidental roadside trash—“gators” (tire shreds), beer cans, construction materials, packaging, and discarded bedding. In keeping with the historical painting genre, they provide reflection on time passing.

Read more

Il deterioramento è un terreno fertile da esplorare.
Ed Ruscha

Gagosian Roma è lieta di presentare una mostra di nuovi dipinti di Ed Ruscha.

Ruscha ha rappresentato gli Stati Uniti alla Biennale di Venezia del 2005 con Course of Empire, un progetto ispirato all’omonimo ciclo del pittore americano Thomas Cole (1801–1848), raffigurante la trasformazione di un paesaggio nel corso del tempo: da una originale condizione di pura naturalezza, a luogo industrializzato, a terreno arido e desolato. Nel corpus Psycho Spaghetti Westerns del 2011, Ruscha continua a sviluppare la poetica di queste riflessioni, concentrandosi sul deterioramento del panorama americano contemporaneo, sia a livello empirico che metaforico. Un delicato esercizio di memoria e percezione che ha definito “spreco e recupero”.

Negli ampi dipinti orizzontali di questa serie, il paesaggio diventa un vero e proprio concetto teorico di piani astratti e contigui—da una parte lo sfondo sfumato e dall’altra il primo piano figurativo (prato, boscaglia, roccia)—tagliati da una diagonale decisa. Questa soluzione pittorica utilizzata spesso dall’artista, già dalla serie Standard Station del 1960, qui si trasforma in un palcoscenico pittorico neutrale su cui si stagliano nature morte iperrealiste, rifiuti quali brandelli di pneumatici (“gators”), lattine di birra, materiali da costruzione e imballaggio, materassi abbandonati: alterazioni della realtà per cause naturali o sociali.

Nei lavori più recenti in mostra a Roma, Ruscha prosegue la meditazione malinconica della serie Psycho Spaghetti Westerns attraverso immagini complesse che fondono i suoi segni distintivi con le tecniche pittoriche e le atmosfere raffinate dei Grandi Maestri del passato, trasformando il romantico viaggio on the road della giovinezza in un panorama distopico sul ciglio della strada. In Gators pneumatici scoppiati, rappresentati meticolosamente a grandezza naturale, fluttuano come esemplari botanici su uno sfondo completamente bianco; in Hydraulic Muscles, Pneumatic Smiles frammenti simili si librano dietro la scritta omonima su un fondo porpora sfumato in bianco, creando abilmente il legame uomo-macchina. In Bliss Bucket, un dipinto ispirato tanto al Surrealismo quanto alla realtà, un materasso logoro con lenzuola sgualcite—forse un rifugio di fortuna—giace enigmaticamente al di sotto di una grande battuta musicale con chiave di violino, posta ingegnosamente di scorcio per aggiungere profondità e prospettiva alla raffigurazione in piano.

Con imperturbabili rappresentazioni di simboli e segni archetipici, Ruscha sintetizza l’immaginario della cultura popolare in codici cinematografici e tipografici tanto accessibili quanto profondi. La sua pungente e talvolta criptica selezione di parole attinge agli episodi di ambiguità accidentale propri dell’interazione tra linguaggio e immagine. Sebbene le sue fonti d’ispirazione siano innegabilmente radicate nell’osservazione da vicino del gergo americano, i suoi dipinti, disegni, fotografie, e libri d’artista, elegantemente laconici, esplorano temi più complessi e universali, quali l’apparenza, la percezione, lo scopo del mondo e della nostra evanescente e transitoria presenza in esso.

Un catalogo illustrato sarà pubblicato in occasione della mostra e comprenderà un saggio di Alex Kitnick e un testo di Bob Monk.

Edward Ruscha Catalogue Raisonné of the Paintings: Volume Six, 1998–2003 e Edward Ruscha Catalogue Raisonné of the Drawings: Volume One, 1956–1976 sono stati pubblicati da Gagosian all’inizio di quest’anno.

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