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Ed Ruscha

Vowels

September 11–28, 1996
Beverly Hills

Ed Ruscha, Vowel #22 (O), 1996 Acrylic on book cover (Retrospective), 10 × 10 × 5 inches (25.4 × 25.4 × 1.3 cm)

Ed Ruscha, Vowel #22 (O), 1996

Acrylic on book cover (Retrospective), 10 × 10 × 5 inches (25.4 × 25.4 × 1.3 cm)

About

Exhibition of one hundred unique works by Ed Ruscha to benefit the Estate Project for Artists with AIDS and AIDS Project Los Angeles

Gagosian is pleased to present a benefit exhibition of new work by Ed Ruscha. Proceeds from the exhibition will benefit two Los Angeles AIDS organizations:

The Estate Project for Artists with AIDS is the first national organization to assist artists with HIV and AIDS in presenting, continuing, and preserving their work. Through cost-effective services such as free art materials and estate planning, the Estate Project focuses on the needs of one of the communities most devastated by AIDS—the arts community. The Estate Project began work in Los Angeles last year and also provides assistance to artists in New York, Miami, and Chicago. The Estate Project works with existing AIDS and arts service organizations to enhance their programs and to provide funding for special efforts focused on artists with HIV and AIDS.

AIDS Project Los Angeles (APLA) is well known as the leading AIDS service provider in Los Angeles. APLA provides a range of services including case management, entitlements, housing, a food bank, dental care, and health care.

Patrick Moore, director of the Estate Project, explains, “We are delighted to be working with the AIDS Project Los Angeles to jointly raise funds to assist people with AIDS. Because the Estate Project receives referrals from APLA, it makes a great deal of sense to work together in this way as well. To have Ed Ruscha, one of the most important living American artists, working with us to assist his colleagues in the arts community who are living with AIDS is an incredible opportunity.”

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.

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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