Edward Ruscha

Gagosian Gallery, Beverly Hills
Acquired by the present owner from the above

This work is in very good overall condition. All surface and color nuances appear inherent to the artist's working method. There is evidence of slight wear around the corners. There is no apparent evidence of restoration visible when examined under UV light. Unframed.
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At the age of 19, a young Ed Ruscha left his hometown in Oklahoma for the appeal of the "Wild West" of California. Since this defining journey, Ruscha has created a body of work that is uniquely American in both subject and sensibility.  Ruscha's most iconic paintings, capture the sensibility of the American West through the appropriation of famous images from his adopted home of Los Angeles, including the 20^th Century Fox logo, the Standard Station and the celebrated Hollywood sign. Abstract Painting, painted thirty years after the iconic Hollywood, exemplifies the consistency with which Ruscha employs motifs of Los Angeles while continuing to explore and communicate the objects that make our culture function. 

 

In Hollywood, Ruscha rendered the letters in a severe perspective, at once evoking animation and speed, as if driving past the sign toward the opportunities of Los Angeles. The sign is framed by a dramatic, blazing sunset intimating the allure of Hollywood while also suggesting the heroism and romanticism associated with the end of a film. Ruscha captures the sensation of the city as one of hope and possibility.  In Abstract Painting, Ruscha continues to explore the experience and importance of movies, but nullifies any literality and engages abstraction and imagination. Ruscha commented, "I can't always identify where it intersects, movies and paintings or movies and art? It all ... works together," (Alexandra Schwartz ed., Leave Any Information at the Signal. Writings, Interviews, Bits, Pages, Cambridge, 2004). As such, Abstract Painting depicts an edgeless still from the end of movie, the lines at the end of a film reel layered over an anonymous landscape in the setting sun. The canvas is deliberately in proportion to a movie screen, echoing Ruscha's sentiment regarding the intersection of movies and paintings. Accustomed to devoting one's attention to the screen, the viewer is positioned to absorb the message presented by the screen-like canvas. By quoting from his previously established visual vocabulary, Ruscha communicates an awareness of the increased prevalence of the screen - of movies, television, computers – in our contemporary culture.