Ed Ruscha - Unbound: Online Auction New York Monday, October 21, 2019 | Phillips

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  • Provenance

    Anthony d'Offay, London
    Tina Kim Gallery, New York
    Acquired from the above by the present owner

  • Catalogue Essay

    The name Ed Ruscha has become synonymous with Los Angeles, his text-based paintings have revolutionized the relationship between the visual and the semiotic. As a West Coast artist, Ruscha fully embraced the visual culture of Los Angeles and both its natural and artificial landscapes. He has pioneered the notion of words as visual abstractions, inducing a physical reaction based on their chosen hue, typography and context. The word “Beverly,” executed in apple red makes reference to Beverly Boulevard one of the main east-west thoroughfares in Los Angeles which runs right through West Hollywood. Viewers will have conventional associations with aspects of the work—its font, the color red, the wood grain background and Ruscha is compelling the viewer to reconsider all of his preconceived notions. In the artist’s words, “I love the language, words have temperatures…when they reach a certain point and become hot words they appeal to me.”

  • Artist Biography

    Ed Ruscha

    American • 1937

    Quintessentially American, Ed Ruscha is an L.A.-based artist whose art, like California itself, is both geographically rooted and a metaphor for an American state of mind. Ruscha is a deft creator of photography, film, painting, drawing, prints and artist books, whose works are simultaneously unexpected and familiar, both ironic and sincere.

    His most iconic works are at turns poetic and deadpan, epigrammatic text with nods to advertising copy, juxtaposed with imagery that is either cinematic and sublime or seemingly wry documentary. Whether the subject is his iconic Standard Gas Station or the Hollywood Sign, a parking lot or highway, his works are a distillation of American idealism, echoing the expansive Western landscape and optimism unique to postwar America.

    View More Works

14

Beverly

signed and dated "Ed Ruscha '99" lower right
acrylic and graphite on lithograph
6 x 8 3/8 in. (15.2 x 21.3 cm.)
Executed in 1999.

Estimate
$20,000 - 30,000 

Sold for $25,000

Contact Specialist

Katherine Lukacher
Head of Online Sales, 20th Century & Contemporary Art
+1 212 940 1215
klukacher@phillips.com

Unbound: Online Auction

Online 21 - 30 October 2019 | Bidding closes October 30th, 2pm EDT