Leo Castelli Gallery, New York Barbara Bertozzi Castelli, New York Private Collection
Exhibited
Fort Worth, Fort Worth Art Center Museum, Contemporary American Art: Los Angeles, from Fort Worth-Dallas Collections, January 12 - February 6, 1972 Vero Beach, Florida, Gallery at Windsor, Ed Ruscha: The Drawn World, December 7, 2003 - February 1, 2004 New York, Whitney Museum of American Art, Cotton Puffs, Q-Tips, Smoke and Mirrors: The Drawings of Ed Ruscha, June 24 - September 26, 2004, then traveled to Los Angeles, Museum of Contemporary Art (October 17, 2004 - January 17, 2005), Washington, D.C., National Gallery of Art (February 13 - May 30, 2005)Saratoga Springs, New York, Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery, Skidmore College, Twice Drawn: Modern and Contemporary Drawings in Context, part 2, October 7 - December 30, 2006
Literature
Ed Ruscha: The Drawn World, exh. cat., Gallery at Windsor, Vero Beach, Florida, 2004, n.p. (illustrated)Cotton Puffs, Q-Tips, Smoke and Mirrors: The Drawings of Ed Ruscha, exh. cat., Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, 2005, p. 139, pl. 97 (illustrated) Twice Drawn: Modern and Contemporary Drawings in Context, part 2, exh. cat., Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery, Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, New York, pp. 176-77 (illustrated)E. Ruscha, They Called Her Styrene, London: Phaidon, 2000, n.p. (illustrated)L. Turvey, Edward Ruscha: Catalogue Raisonné of the Works on Paper, Volume 1: 1956-1976, Gagosian Gallery, New York & Yale University Press, New Haven, 2014, p. 271, no. D1970.59 (illustrated)
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.