In 1956, at the age of 18, Ed Ruscha left his home in Oklahoma and drove a 1950 Ford sedan to Los Angeles, where he had been accepted to Chouinard Art Institute. His trip roughly followed the fabled Route 66 through the Southwest, which featured many of the sights that would provide him with artistic subjects for decades to come.

Currently on display at San Francisco’s de Young are over eighty works revealing the artist’s fascination with the evolving landscape and iconic character of the “American West” in symbolic, evocative, and ironic renditions. Key to several of his best-known paintings and prints, these include works depicting gasoline stations, others commenting on LA and the film industry, as well as those in which a word or phrase is the sole subject.

Independently of the exhibition but released coinciding with it, Los Angeles’ MOCA has commissioned a short-length documentary about Ruscha’s extraordinary body of work: Ed Ruscha: Buildings and Words.

Ed Ruscha and the Great American West

de Young

San Francisco

16.7.2016 – 09.10.2016

/ by Kim Poorters /

Gagosian Geneva opens today with the first exhibition exclusively devoted to Ed Ruscha's Mountain Prints, both in the form of his distinctive limited-edition paintings, as well as proofs the artist has been producing since 2010.

“I had a notion to make pictures by using words and presenting them in some way and it seemed like a mountain was an archetypal stage set. It was a perfect foil for whatever was happening in the foreground.”

Ruscha has added text upon landscape in his paintings since the 1980’s, introducing an atmosphere of speech, sound, and shape. In his square-format Mountain Prints seemingly banal phrases in white or black letters are centrally superimposed upon the landscapes, with each word occupying a new line in contrast to the perspectival recession of the snow-capped mountains. The prints, each subtly different from the next, are imbued with a graphic tactility amplified by vivid colour combinations.

Ed Ruscha – Mountain Prints

Gagosian Gallery

Geneva

6.4.2016 – 28.5.2016

/ by Kim Poorters /

// THE GREAT AMERICAN WEST //

// MOUNTAIN PRINTS //

TBT_BTB_ARchive

// LATEST //