Ed Ruscha, Roof Top View #1, 1961/2003, Gelatin silver print, 25.4 X 25.4 cm.

Ed Ruscha, Roof Top View #2, 1961/2003, Gelatin silver print, 25.4 X 25.4 cm.

Ed Ruscha, Roof Top View #3, 1961/2003, Gelatin silver print, 25.4 X 25.4 cm.

Ed Ruscha, Roof Top View #4, 1961/2003, Gelatin silver print, 25.4 X 25.4 cm.

Sprüth Magers
Oranienburger Straße 18
+49 (0)30 2 88 84 03 0
Berlin
Ed Ruscha
Apartments, Parking Lots, Palm Trees
and Others: Films, Photographs and Drawings from 1961 to 1975
September 3-October 23, 2010

Since the early 1960s, Ed Ruscha has created an extensive painterly, graphical, and photographic oeuvre. Ruscha first considered working as a graphic artist but soon developed a deep passion for painting and photography. Inspired by the American photography of the 1940s and 1950s, Ruscha developed an independent conceptual approach which is manifested in the sixteen photo-books, created between 1963 and 1978, in which he offered a fresh interpretation of the idea of the artist's book. These small, unpretentious books, which Ruscha always issued in a limited edition, anticipated with their titles in a laconic manner the entire contents of the books, for example Twentysix Gasoline Stations (1963); Various Small Fires and Milk (1964); Some Los Angeles Apartments (1965); Every Building on the Sunset Strip (1966) as well as Thirtyfour Parking Lots in Los Angeles (1967) or Nine Swimmingpools and a Broken Glass (1968). They show how Ruscha broke away from the traditions of the genre and simultaneously distanced himself from the subjectivist, analytical photo-books of such author-photographers as Robert Frank and Walker Evans. Coming to the fore here, instead of pictorial sequences ordered according to formal and contentual critiera, was a serial arrangement in which the disregard of classical conventions of photography, namely the requirements of perspective and composition, became a characteristic of his photographic aesthetic. Ruscha's pictures map out the redundant appearance of the West Coast civilization of the USA through the monotony and repetitiveness of the series.

Although Ed Ruscha considers himself to be a painter and draftsman rather than a photographer, in 1999 he issued thirty motifs from his artist book Thirtyfour Parking Lots (1967/1999). His procedure of selection for the reedited photographs was intuitive. He described it in this way: "Originally, I thought that the pictures were a means to an end, a vehicle to make a book. And then along the way there was some gear shifting. Over the years, I began to appreciate print quality and see my photographs as not necessarily reproductions for a book, but as having their own life as silver gelatin prints." The exhibition presents works which are characteristic of Ruscha's photographic oeuvre, and which arose in the context of the artist-books but are not necessarily a part of them. For example, the black silhouette of the palm tree, which originally adorned the main motif of the artist book entitled A Few Palm Trees (1971), was later featured as an autonomous photograph in the series Palm Trees (1971/2003). Furthermore, Ruscha combined a selection of ‘outtakes‘ into the portfolio Real Estate Opportunities (1970/2003), which brings together photographs of unattractive building sites with subtle irony.

Equally characteristic for Ruscha's aesthetic are the pictures of unfrequented sections of streets in the Roof Top Views (1961/2003), which suggest an arbitrary selection of images. Works such as the completely deserted views of the stereotypical architecture of Apartment Houses (1965/2003) convey, through both a formal and technical nonchalance as well as through their distanced perspective, a sharp break with the viewing habits of the time.

The apartment buildings, which are typical of Los Angeles and are photographed from an extremely slanted angle, are also reminiscent of the experimental perspective of the Russian Formalists. With these photographs, Ruscha clarified his point of view with regard to photography: "Drawings would never express the idea — I like facts, facts, facts are in these books. The closest representation to an apartment house in Some Los Angeles Apartments is a photograph, nothing else, not a drawing, because that becomes somebody else’s vision of what it is, and this is the camera’s eye, the closest delineation of that subject." But he contradicted this particular statement by creating in the same year several graphite drawings on the basis of these photographs, precisely because a personal interpretation of this theme was interesting for him. Here the studies, reduced to their semiotic character and based on concrete geographical models, such as Study for Doheny Drive Apartment Building (1965) and Study for St. Tropez Apartment Building (1965), make it clear how much Ruscha uses both media in his oeuvre, and the manner in which they exercise a mutual influence on each other.

The interpenetration of the various genres becomes especially apparent in his only film works Premium (1971) and Miracle (1975). Proceeding from a short story by Mason Willians entitled How to Derive the Maximum Enjoyment from Crackers (1964), Ruscha arranged in Premium a scenario which he first projected in his photobook Crackers from 1969 and subsequently transformed into a film. Miracle contains the essence of the artist's same-named painting, inasmuch as the story is told of a strange day in the life of an auto mechanic.

Ed Ruscha was born in 1937 in Omaha, Nebraska; he lives and works in Los Angeles. In 2005 Ruscha represented the United States of America at the fifty-first Biennial in Venice; in September 2006, Ruscha was awarded the cultural prize of the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Photographie (DGPh, German Society for Photography).

Important solo exhibitions have included Cotton Puffs, Q-tips®, Smoke and Mirrors: The Drawings of Ed Ruscha at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles in 2004 which could subsequently be seen at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. Furthermore, during the same year the Whitney Museum initiated the exhibition Ed Ruscha and Photography. Likewise in 2004, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney presented an exhibition with a selection of Ruscha's photographs as well as paintings, drawings, and artist books, which was subsequently shown at the Museo Nazionale delle Arti del XXI Secolo in Rome, as well as at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art in Edinburgh. A further exhibition of Ruscha's photographs entitled Ed Ruscha and Photography was mounted in 2006 by the Jeu de Paume in Paris, the Kunsthaus Zürich and the Museum Ludwig in Cologne. In 2009 the Hayward Gallery in London organized what is certainly the most comprehensive retrospective of Ruscha's paintings up to now with the exhibition Fifty Years of Painting, which after the Haus der Kunst in Munich may currently be seen until the beginning of September at its final station, the Moderna Museet in Stockholm.

Ed Ruscha, Palm Trees, 1971/2003, Gelatin silver print, 25.4 X 50.8 cm.

Ed Ruscha, The Old Tech-Chem Building, 2003, Courtesy The Broad Art Foundation, Santa Monica, © Ed Ruscha, 2009, Photography: Paul Ruscha.

Ed Ruscha, The Back of Hollywood, 1977, Courtesy Collection Musée d'art contemporain de Lyon, © Ed Ruscha, 2009, Photography: Paul Ruscha.

Ed Ruscha, Talk Radio, 1988, Courtesy the collection of Joe Goode and Hiromi Katayama, © Ed Ruscha, 2009, Photography: Paul Ruscha.

Ed Ruscha, Untitled, 1986, Courtesy of James Corcoran Gallery, Los Angeles, © Ed Ruscha, 2009, Photography: Paul Ruscha.

Edward Ruscha, OOF, 1962 (reworked 1963). Oil on canvas, Courtesy MoMA, New York. Gift of Agnes Gund, the Louis and Bessie Adler Foundation, Inc., Robert and Meryl Meltzer, Jerry I. Speyer, Anna Marie and Robert F. Shapiro, Emily and Jerry Spiegel, an anonymous donor, and purchase. © 2010 Edward Ruscha, 256.1988.

Ed Ruscha, Securing The Last Letter, 1964, Courtesy Collection of Emily Fisher Landau, New York, © Ed Ruscha, 2009, Photography: Paul Ruscha.

Haus der kunst
Prinzregentenstrasse 1
+ 49 89 21127-115
Munich
Ed Ruscha
50 Years of Painting
February 12-May 10, 2010

In one of his earliest paintings, E. Ruscha, executed in 1959 during his studies, Ed Ruscha (pronounced: Rew-shay, as the artist clarified in an invitation to a solo exhibition in 1973 in London) had already arranged the letters of his name as characters that filled the painting and were placed in the foreground of a landscape. In the paintings that followed landscapes were only alluded to behind a dominating word by means of a line in the horizon or different color fields. In a further step, Ruscha used trademarks that had the character and function of logos, rather than individual words. As steep diagonals they rush by like billboards along the highway, seen from the viewpoint of driver or, like the "Hollywood" sign, stand in the horizon, having become part of the landscape. With these methods Ruscha transmits the zoom technique and the simulation of speed, as they are used in film and comics, into paintings.

Ed Ruscha (b. 1937 in Nebraska) takes his motifs from the culture that surrounds him, which, in Los Angeles, his home by choice, is strongly influenced by the film and advertising industries. With the word "Annie" he quoted the trademark of the Little Orphan Annie comic strip, created in 1924 for the New York Daily News; the mountain in his Mountain Series is a play on the Paramount Pictures logo; Large Trademark with Eight Spotlights depicts the 20th Century Fox logo, while the dimensions of this work are reminiscent of a movie screen; in his painting The End these two words, which comprised the final shot in all black and white films, are surrounded by scratches and streaks reminiscent of damaged celluloid.

The exhibition provides a comprehensive overview of Ruscha's paintings from the last five decades. The focus the selection of works share is the constants in Ruscha's artistic endeavors: the attention he pays to words and word-paintings. Also apparent is his analytical approach to painting, which, time and again, results in a revision of his formal methods. And finally, by omitting additional artistic forms of expressions that Ed Ruscha also employs, the exhibition demonstrates how his experience with drawing, photograph and film find their way into his painting.

The fascination that such lettering and words have for Ed Ruscha led him to develop his own typeface in 1980, Boy Scout Utility Modern: like the lettering in the "Hollywood" sign on the hills before Los Angeles, the curve of the characters is angular as if they were created by a carpenter. His systematic exploration of the effects of different fonts led Ruscha to use unusual dyes, such as fruit juice, blood, chewing tobacco, chocolate, coffee and tea. In his 1972 work Sphere of Pepto-Bismol the artist used Pepto-Bismol, a pink stomach medicine, as paint; in It's Only Vanishing Cream from 1973 he painted shellac on satin; in Sand in the Vaseline from 1974 he applied egg yolk onto moiré. The particular color effect of such substances is what interested the artist in these experiments, as well as what happened to them as they dried and aged. In this "romance with liquids," as Ed Ruscha himself named the phase, his interest in transience and decay found expression early on.

The motifs he picks up in streets and everyday life are not bound to these origins. Rather Ed Ruscha frees words from their original confines and detaches them from their specific syntactic or semantic context. The three letters OOF — of a comic strip figure being punched in the stomach, for instance — are magnified by Ruscha onto the canvas; they become a kind of still life or object that the viewer can confront with a new way of interpretation. On the one hand the onomatopoetic exclamation speaks even more urgently to the viewer while, on the other, it is relieved of its original function and upgraded to a pictorial object. Many of the words Ruscha has transformed into motifs appear to be abandoned in a strange place or landscape where they wait to be recognized.

With his silhouette paintings from the 1980s Ed Ruscha expanded his artistic repertoire once again. The dark, blurred silhouette of a howling coyote or a row of covered wagons, like those used by the early settlers, activates stereotyped pictures of Americans and their self-image. Instead of words white bars appear, as replacements or as allusions to censorship.

The exhibition will also present a selection of works from the Course of Empire cycle, with which Ed Ruscha represented the USA at the Venice Biennale in 2005. In this work series Ruscha subjected his 1992 Blue Collar cycle to a revision by contrasting the original five black and white paintings with new colored paintings of the same composition. Both the contemporary variations as well as the original motifs depict anonymous, box-like functional structures in arbitrary locations. Their identity is only discernable from the logos of the respective companies on the façades. By means of the changing company names, the paintings tell the tale of "urban frustrations" and the "cruelty of progress" (Ed Ruscha): the replacement of a once strong industry and manufacturing society by the products of service providers in the digital age.

The exhibition is organized by Hayward Gallery, Southbank Centre, London, in association with Haus der Kunst, Munich.

The catalogue, Ed Ruscha. Fifty Years of Painting, is published by Hayward Publishing and contains contributions by James Ellroy, Kristine McKenna, Ralph Rugoff, Alexandra Schwartz, Bruce Wagner and Ulrich Wilmes; English, 192 pages, ISBN 978-1-85332-274-7, store price 39.80 Euros.

Ed Ruscha, Los Angeles County Museum on Fire, 1965-1968, Courtesy Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, © Ed Ruscha 2009, Photography: Lee Stalsworth.

Ed Ruscha, Large Trademark with Eight Spotlights, 1962, Courtesy Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, © Ed Ruscha, 2009, Photography: Paul Ruscha.

Edward Ruscha (American, born 1937). France, 1961, Gelatin silver print; 3-1/2 x 3-1/2", Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; gift of the artist; courtesy Gagosian Gallery, 2004.95. © Ed Ruscha.

Art Institute
of Chicago
111 South
Michigan Avenue
Chicago
312-443-3600
Galleries 1 and 2
Ed Ruscha
and Photography
March 1-June 1, 2008

Ed Ruscha is best known as a seminal American pop and conceptual artist. His iconic paintings of words, American landscapes, and vernacular architecture speak of his deep affinity for the commonplace. But the medium of photography has always been a source of inspiration and discovery. The eye-opening exhibition, Ed Ruscha and Photography features Ruscha’s signature photographic books and dozens of previously unseen original prints. It provides the most comprehensive view of how photography functioned for this leading American artist.

Included in Ed Ruscha and Photography are original prints made for photographic books: Twentysix Gasoline Stations (1963); Various Small Fires and Milk (1964); Some Los Angeles Apartments (1965); and Thirtyfour Parking Lots in Los Angeles (1967). In addition, the show features a striking selection from the more than 300 original photographs made during a seven-month tour that Ruscha took of Europe in 1961. In these images of Austria, England, France, Greece, Italy, Spain, and Yugoslavia, visitors will see the stylistic elements that have marked Ruscha’s work — signage and his strong graphic sensibility — in a context very different from the more well known Ruscha landscapes of Southern California and the west. These photographs are also compelling records of Ruscha’s experimentation with his camera.

A highlight of this exhibition is a selection of Ruscha’s photographic books of the 1960s and 1970s, which have come to embody conceptual artists’ embrace of serial imaging. These books have had a profound impact on the art and careers of many American artists, and speak to the intermingling of Ruscha’s conceptual approach to imagery and photography as a medium. Lewis Baltz, Dan Graham, and Robert Venturi cite Ruscha’s photographic books as influential, and German photographers Bernd and Hilla Becher presented Ruscha’s work to students, such as contemporary artists Thomas Struth and Andreas Gursky.

Born in 1937 in Omaha, Nebraska, and raised in Oklahoma City, Ruscha moved to Los Angeles at 18. He went to Chouinard Art Institute until 1960, before working briefly in commercial advertising. In 1961, he began a career as an artist and produced enigmatic paintings, drawings, and photo books of gasoline stations, apartment buildings, palm trees, vacant lots, and the Hollywood sign. The irony and objective stance of his works from this period placed him in the context of Pop art and Conceptualism, but Ruscha defies categorization. Now 70, Ruscha is known as an important and influential contemporary American artists.

The role of in Ruscha’s career has not been deeply explored until now. What we see in Ed Ruscha and Photography is that the artist has consistently looked to photography, as a subject, a medium, and a vehicle, to inform his artistic practice.