ART CITIES:London-Ed Ruscha

 

Ed Ruscha’s photography, drawing, painting, and artist books record the shifting emblems of American life in the last half century. His deadpan representations of Hollywood logos, stylized gas stations, and archetypal landscapes distil the imagery of popular culture into a language of cinematic and typographical codes that are as accessible as they are profound.

By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Gagosian Gallery Archive

In his solo exhibition “Extremes and In-betweens”, Ed Ruscha presents paintings that all completed in 2016, Ed Ruscha sets in motion a dynamic interplay of words and their meanings in ascending and descending shifts of scale and tone that echo the relation of macrocosm to microcosm. Universe With Wrinkles depicts places in a diminishing progression from “Universe” to “America” to “Tampa, Florida” to “10414 N. Newport Circle”, continuing to shrink co-ordinates becoming progressively less readable and thus less visible. The subtle, powdery backgrounds of the paintings vary between muted black and an earth-like tone that Ruscha describes as “A color that forgot it was a color”. In the process of stenciling that Ruscha employs here, the background is laid over stencils onto the primed canvas, rendering the words as negative space. A distinct group of four paintings take up the recurring mountain motif in his oeuvre, which first appeared in the ‘90s. Underscoring other references to cinematic devices across Ruscha’s oeuvre, the blushing mountain peaks that appear at the center of each canvas are framed as if in a darkened cinematic aperture, and subtitled with relational word groups such as in All Some None. This verbal progression, in turn, echoes the conceptual vanishing points of the word paintings.

Info: Gagosian Gallery, 20 Grosvenor Hill, London, Duration: 5/10-17/12/16, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, www.gagosian.com