Ed Ruscha - Contemporary Art Evening Sale London Tuesday, October 11, 2011 | Phillips

Contemporary Art Evening Sale

12 October 2011
London

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  • Provenance

    Private Collection, USA

  • Catalogue Essay

    Ruscha was born in Omaha, Nebraska in 1937 and in 1956 at the age of nineteen, he moved to Los Angeles where he still lives and works today. Inspired by the contemporary landscape which surrounds him, Ruscha’s work is emblematic of the rural, commercial and urban everyday scenes of west-coast America. Painted in a flat, dead-pan manner, his paintings often mimic the style of billboard advertisements allowing them to be instantly familiar but at the same time give a sense of detachment.They seem to refer to what American art and cultural critic Dave Hickey has called the “discontinuous connectedness of contemporary culture”.

    “My imagery can come from almost anywhere in America, it’s American. The pictorial goings-on in my work are almost always from American sources, and American in subject matter, American in feeling.”
    (The artist, in an interview with Paul Karlstrom, in Ed Ruscha, Leave Any Information at the Signal: Writings, Interviews, Bits, Pages, ed. Alexandra Schwartz, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004, p. 150)

    Fascinated by the visual impact of signs, from the mid-sixties, Ruscha had developed his own preoccupation with the use of word play set within an image. This exploration of the English language, using words as visual objects has remained a prominent feature throughout his long career. Punchy words, names or striking phrases are typically suspended within flat, banal painted backgrounds. In a similar manner to New York based artists Joseph Kosuth (b. 1945) and Lawrence Weiner (b. 1942) who were also involved in the production of text-based works, collectively they are considered to be pioneering figures behind the establishment of Conceptual art. Through their use of text they examine the symbolic function of language and challenge traditional notions of art as a physical object and call into question the essence of what constitutes art as art. Ruscha, however, perhaps has a stronger association with Pop art in the words’ associations with contemporary commercial and visual culture.

    “I’m not as much interested in words as I am in the evocative power of them, rather than their poetic power.”
    (The artist, in an interview with Paul Karlstrom, in E. Ruscha, Leave Any Information at the Signal: Writings, Interviews, Bits, Pages, ed. Alexandra Schwartz, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004, p. 221).

    “Ruscha’s ingenious approach involved incorporating different types of crossed signals in his paintings. Chief among these was his use of language as a subject for pictures – an idea that made perfect sense in a culture where, increasingly, the preeminence of language as a means of communication was being challenged by the ubiquitous circulation of images. By displacing word onto canvas and removing it from a specific syntactical context, Ruscha endowed it with a status, setting up an uncanny equivalence between what it looked like and what it signified as language.”
    (Ralph Rugoff, ‘Heavenly Noises’ in Ed Ruscha: 50 Years of Painting, London: Hayward Gallery Publishing, 2009, p. 16)

    With meaning detached from the words, the paintings evoke a strong sense of ambiguity. This sense of ambiguity is further heightened by the remaining abstract components of the composition. A ghostly airbrushed female figure stands with her hands placed on her hips and haunts the background of the painting. Is this meant to be Judy? (Ruscha developed a series of paintings in the 1980s referred to as ‘the silhouette paintings’ which incorporated the airbrushed silhouette into his work). Weeds occupy the foreground – remnants from a desolate rural American landscape backdrop, perhaps referring to an old Western film. Appearing as a scene from the night a dark blue haze permeates around the luminous silhouette set against a black background. The text, the figure and the vegetation although gently overlapping one another remain isolated and detached – this purposeful disjointedness creates a sense of unease. Combined with the nocturnal feel, the work exudes an apocalyptic mood carrying a quiet melancholic undertone.

  • Artist Biography

    Ed Ruscha

    American • 1937

    Quintessentially American, Ed Ruscha is an L.A.-based artist whose art, like California itself, is both geographically rooted and a metaphor for an American state of mind. Ruscha is a deft creator of photography, film, painting, drawing, prints and artist books, whose works are simultaneously unexpected and familiar, both ironic and sincere.

    His most iconic works are at turns poetic and deadpan, epigrammatic text with nods to advertising copy, juxtaposed with imagery that is either cinematic and sublime or seemingly wry documentary. Whether the subject is his iconic Standard Gas Station or the Hollywood Sign, a parking lot or highway, his works are a distillation of American idealism, echoing the expansive Western landscape and optimism unique to postwar America.

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24

Ed Ruscha

Judy

1992
Acrylic on canvas.
66 x 72.6 cm (25 7/8 x 28 5/8 in).
Signed and dated ‘Ed Ruscha 1992’ on the reverse.

Estimate
£180,000 - 220,000 ‡

Sold for £193,250

Contemporary Art Evening Sale

12 October 2011
London