Gagosian Gallery, Los Angeles
Private Collection
Los Angeles, Gagosian Gallery, Ed Ruscha, November 20, 1998 - January 16, 1999
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)
Cotton Puffs, Q-Tips, Smoke and Mirrors: The Drawings of Ed Ruscha, exh. cat., Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, 2005, p. 231, pl. 190 (illustrated)
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