Ed Ruscha - Editions & Works on Paper New York Tuesday, April 16, 2024 | Phillips
  • “I wanted to expand my ideas about materials and the value they have.”
    —Ed Ruscha

    Fruit-Metrecal Hollywood sees Ruscha merge two of his characteristic artistic attributes, utilizing unconventional, organic materials to render an extremely horizontal interpretation of the iconic Hollywood sign. Overtly panoramic, Fruit Metrecal Hollywood emphasizes Ruscha’s continued view that horizontality and landscape are synonymous notions – in this case the Hollywood hills as well as the multisyllabic word “Hollywood."

     

    At this point in his printmaking career, Ruscha was no stranger to printing with unconventional pigments, many of them edible. By 1971, the artist had already experimented with running coffee, raw egg, Pepto-Bismol, baked beans, Branston Pickle, and caviar, among others, through silkscreens, notably in his 1969 portfolio Stains. While outlandish in nature, the choice of these materials was completely intentional. Metrecal was a diet drink, and Ruscha’s use of this substance to depict the Hollywood sign evokes the vanities that might be associated with an L.A. existence. In addition to toying with different types of jam (strawberry and boysenberry) before settling upon grape and apricot, Ruscha tried printing with Sego chocolate, Bosco chocolate syrup, and salmon before arriving at the desired combination of ingredients that became the recipe for Fruit Metrecal Hollywood. Eschewing the typical framework of art conservation, Ruscha welcomed the possibility that these organic materials may change over time as part of the artwork’s natural life.

    • Literature

      Siri Engberg 53

    • 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

157

Fruit-Metrecal Hollywood (E. 53)

1971
Screenprint in grape jam, apricot jam and Metrecal, on Copperplate Deluxe paper, with full margins.
I. 10 x 37 1/2 in. (25.4 x 95.3 cm)
S. 14 1/2 x 42 in. (36.8 x 106.7 cm)

Signed, dated and annotated 'artist's proof' in pencil (one of 18 artist's proofs, the edition was 85), co-published by the artist and Bernard Jacobson, Ltd., London, framed.

Full Cataloguing

Estimate
$12,000 - 18,000 

Sold for $15,240

Contact Specialist

editions@phillips.com
212-940-1220

Editions & Works on Paper

New York Auction 16 - 17 April