ART CITIES:N.York-Ed Ruscha

Ed Ruscha is widely regarded as one of the world’s most important artists with a career spanning six decades from the early 1960s until the present day. His use of the imagery and techniques seen in commercial art such as advertising and his interest in popular culture and the everyday, connects him directly with pop art. He was also very influential to the development of conceptual art through his depiction of words and phrases, and his books of deadpan photographs characterised by their low-key humour.

By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Gagosian Gallery Archive

Ed Ruscha has presented recurring images like the American flag, mountains, books, and words, that are suggestive yet never didactic, and the development of these images over the course of his illustrious career exemplifies the wry refinement and subtlety with which he speaks through painting. In his new paintings, Ruscha has chosen to revisit the flag, the mountain, and the tire. Flags entered Ruscha’s visual vocabulary between 1985 and 1987, rippling in the breeze over dramatic sunsets or triumphant blue skies, offset with subtle warning cues of black bars resembling censor strips. The motif returned in “OUR FLAG” (2017), which served as a polling site for the November election—where it disintegrated into shreds set against a near-black sky. The flag becomes newly distorted in “RIPPLING FLAG” (2020), this time abnormally widened to extend past the right-side frame, its flowing surface creating twisted shapes and shadows over the red and white stripes. In “Top of Flag” (2020), only a fraction of the standard is visible at the bottom of the canvas, surrounded by a gradation of shadow, almost as though the flag were a setting sun or a dimming spotlight on a stage. In new mountain paintings, Ruscha presents one of his archetypal snowy ranges, but inverts one of the peaks so that it appears to descend from the sky. A shredded tire tread, or “gator,” which Ruscha first referred to in his series of “Psycho Spaghetti Western” paintings, hovers over a barren, red-skied landscape in “Hardscrabble” (2020). These tire shreds also appeared in “Blue Collar Tires” (1992), which formed part of the “Course of Empire” series, Ruscha’s contribution for the American Pavilion at the Biennale di Venezia in 2005.

Photo: Ed Ruscha, Hardscrabble, 2020 Acrylic on canvas, 81.3 × 122 cm, © Ed Ruscha. Photo: Paul Ruscha, Courtesy the artist and Gagosian

Info: Gagosian Gallery, 541 West 24th Street, New York, Duration: 14/11/2020-23/1/2021, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-13:00 & 14:00-18:00 (by appointment only, book here), https://gagosian.com