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.

Boss根据Ruscha, 1961,,是他的第一个成熟的painting and one of the few canvases he completed with a heavy impasto surface. The impasto gives the word “Boss” a visual weight, as in concrete poetry where a word literally becomes an object. Ruscha quickly abandoned the idea of a word taking on an object quality, however, in exchange for smoother surfaces and more simplistic linguistic constructions. The distinction between “boss” as a person who leads and “boss” as a late 1950s figure of speech adds to the painting’s depth and the play between the image and the object quality of the paint.

Ruscha’s drawing and photography have always inspired and laid the groundwork for his painting, but in recent years, these works have become heavily sought after as mature expressions of Ruscha’s oeuvre. In the late 1960s, Ruscha started employing gunpowder in drawing as a way to soften the texture of his images as well as to gain more control over atmospheric effect. Ruscha used cotton puffs to rub the fine powder into the paper, applying multiple layers in a laborious process.Turn Around, 1979, takes the gunpowder technique to the level of metaphor, wittily asking one to turn around as if they were at gunpoint. The expression recalls the Wild West persona often applied to Ruscha, stemming from his Route 66 cross-country journey from Oklahoma to Los Angeles in his early twenties.

In 2005, Ruscha represented the United States at the Venice Biennial.Blue Collar Tech-Chem, 1992, andThe Old Tech-Chem Building, 2003, were featured in the show. The paintings depict the transformation of an industrial building from a Tech-Chem facility into Fat Boy. Inspired by Thomas Cole’s nineteenth-centuryTheCourse of Empirecycle, the works denote a journey from darkness (as is the background ofBlue CollarTech-Chem) into a place of looming destruction. Emblazoned with Fat Boy,The Old Tech-Chem Buildingrepresents a decadent morning with death on the horizon. Fat Boy is the name of the nuclear bomb dropped over Nagasaki; the crimson sunrise conjures the Los Angeles sky when a distant grass fire burns and the sun turns bloodshot red.

Azteca, 2007, andAzteca in Decline, 2007,两个又长又窄的三联图画描绘three flags or ribbons of color in transformation and destruction. In the first triptych, Ruscha recreates a mural he saw in Mexico City. Both the mural and the wall are represented in trompe l’oeil entirety, with seams and cracks and drips. In the second triptych, Ruscha shows the mural melting into tectonic, dissolving forms. Rather than following the large plumes of color to their destruction, the wall is steadfast along with a small burst of graffiti.