ART CITIES: Los Angeles-Ed Ruscha

One of the most important postwar artists, Ed Ruscha came into prominence during the 1960s pop art movement. First recognized for his associations to graphic design and commercial art, Ruscha became admired for his meditations on word and image. Working in a variety of media and taking the environment of Los Angeles as a guide, Ruscha creates candid, comic presentations of familiar ideas and locations that continue to impact contemporary art.

By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Gemini G.E.L. Archive

The artworks on display in the exhibition “Ed Ruscha: Here and Now” are a selection of prints published by Gemini G.E.L. over the past 50 years that demonstrate Ruscha’s ability to blend the mundane with the profound as well as his exploration of language and imagery, qualities that makes his work timeless and relevant. Ruscha’s fascination with language is evident throughout his prints, as he explores the visual representation and changing meanings of words and symbols.  One of the best examples of this is his Cityscape series (2007), which play with redacted words on neutral backgrounds, and the captions printed proportionately in the bottom mar- gin display the menacing and amusing messages. Ruscha’s work often features words and phrases juxtaposed against urban landscapes, reflecting his deep connection to his adopted hometown of Los Angeles, which is stylized in the heavily traveled intersection “Pico and Sepulveda”” (2001) and “Unstructured Merriment” (2015), capturing a local Los Angeles home well-known for its parties. Also on display are a selection of editions Ruscha created at Gemini that were donated to various causes, campaigns, and benefits. “Main Street” (1990) was the artist’s first benefit print for the campaign of Harvey Gantt, who ran against Jesse Helms for a U.S. Senate seat in North Carolina in 1990. “Liberty” (2011) was published to benefit People for the American Way, a national progressive advocacy organization. The artist contributed multiple prints to portfolios of artwork for Barack Obama’s 2008 and 2012 presidential campaign, which are also on display. At the start of his artistic career, Ed Ruscha called himself an “abstract artist … who deals with subject matter”. Abandoning academic connotations that came to be associated with Abstract Expressionism, he looked instead to tropes of advertising and brought words (as form, symbol, and material) to the forefront of painting. Working in diverse media with humor and wit, he oscillates between sign and substance, locating the sublime in landscapes both natural and artificial. In 1956, Ruscha moved from Oklahoma City to Los Angeles, where he attended the Chouinard Art Institute. During his time in art school, he had been painting in the manner of Franz Kline and Willem de Kooning, and came across a reproduction of Jasper Johns’s “Target with Four Faces” (1955). Struck by Johns’s use of readymade images as supports for abstraction, Ruscha began to consider how he could employ graphics in order to expose painting’s dual identity as both object and illusion. For his first word painting, “E.Ruscha” (1959), he intentionally miscalculated the space it would take to write his first initial and surname on the canvas, inserting the last two letters, HA, above and indicating the “error” with an arrow. After graduation, Ruscha began to work for ad agencies, honing his skills in schematic design and considering questions of scale, abstraction, and viewpoint, which became integral to his painting and photography. He produced his first artist’s book, “Twentysix Gasoline Stations”, a series of deadpan photographs the artist took while driving on Route 66 from Los Angeles to Oklahoma City—in 1963. Ruscha since has gone on to create over a dozen artists’ books, including the 25-foot-long, accordion-folded “Every Building on the Sunset Strip” (1966) and his version of Kerouac’s iconic “On the Road” (2009). Ruscha also paints trompe-l’oeil bound volumes and alters book spines and interiors with painted words: books in all forms pervade his investigations of language and the distribution of art and information. Ruscha’s paintings of the 1960s explore the noise and the fluidity of language. With works such as “OOF” (1962–63)—which presents the exclamation in yellow block letters on a blue ground—it is nearly impossible to look at the painting without verbalizing the visual. The exhibition “Custom-Built Intrigue: Drawings 1974–84” (2017), comprised a decade of reverse-stencil drawings of phrases rendered in pastel, dry pigment, and various edible substances, from spinach to carrot juice.

Photo: Ed Ruscha, All Points, 2008, (ER08-1579) 3 color lithograph 12″ x 14″ (30.48 x 35.56 cm), Edition of 150, © Ed Ruscha, Courtesy the artist and Gemini G.E.L Gallery

Info: Gemini G.E.L Gallery, 8365 Melrose Avenue, Los Angeles, CA, USA, Duration: 13/4-25/6/2024, Days & Hours: Mon-Fri 9:00-17:00, www.geminigel.com/