Ed Ruscha

Donated by the artist

This work is in very good condition overall. There is very light evidence of wear and handling toward the edges and the sides are taped. The surface is bright, fresh and clean. Under Ultraviolet light inspection, there is no evidence of restoration. Unframed.
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"On close examination, Ruscha's super-real, photographic mountains break up into a complex series of little flat planes of color, similar to a paint-by-number kit or the methods used by billboard painters. The natural appearance of the mountains is only an illusion; rather, Ruscha gives us the 'idea' of the mountain'." Kerry Brougher ('Words and Landscape', in Exh. Cat., Washington, D.C., Hirschhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Ed Ruscha, 2000, p. 174).

Best known for his textual paintings in which he incorporates lyrical phrases or sometimes just single words, Ed Ruscha has solidified his stature in contemporary American art by conflating the viewer’s understanding of the “word” and the “image” and the manner in which the two are seen, recognized and read.  Seen through the lens of the artist’s oeuvre, the majesty of the soaring snow-capped mountains terminating in the glacial lake below is exposed as artifice, an “uh oh” moment for the viewer literally explicated on the canvas. 

Ruscha was born and raised in the Midwest but in 1956 he set out to California where he studied at the Chouinard Art Institute, now the California Institute of the Arts. Upon graduation, he took a job as a commercial illustrator and layout artist for an advertising agency in the area – such experiences would lay the groundwork for much of his artistic creation in the coming years. Getting his start publishing art books of his own photographs of Los Angeles and as a sign painter, Ruscha’s art is a continuation of his fascination with the manner in which the word and the image affect the viewer. Similarly, by overlaying the text on top of the image he is able to play with the effects of how the two can interact cooperatively and disjointedly in a unified picture.  In addition to the work he did on his own books, Ruscha’s experiences as a commercial illustrator fostered an interest in the aesthetics of text, its manifold typologies and the formalism of letters as pure shapes worthy of artistic study. Simultaneously, his intellectual curiosity in found words, linguistic ready-mades, became a staple of his work. 

Ruscha skewers the traditional rendering of the mountains’ majesty by overlaying the simple expression of fallibility, and in so doing redirects our attention to the artificiality of the reproduced image.  Just as unavoidable as the imposing nature of the mountains, is the amusing and beguiling admission of mistake. As the artist himself concedes, “Paradox and absurdity have just always been really delicious to me.”