Annely Judd, London Gagosian Gallery, New York John Berggruen Gallery, San Francisco Sotheby's, New York, Contemporary Art Part II, 16 November 1995, lot 371 Acquired from the above sale by the present owner
Catalogue Essay
Ruscha’s use of text is iconic. Executed in 1972, this particular lot features a single word, Spots, in a carefree style levitating from the centre of the piece against a smoky, monochromatic atmosphere. Despite the small-scale of the text, Spots demonstrates the agency possessed by a single word, thus inviting the spectator to view words as images and read images as words. Through his laconic aesthetic, Ruscha investigates the complex debate on the function of words and the evasive interplay between image and word.
Ruscha’s particular interest in the ambiguity between the linguistic signifier and the concept signified is emphasised by his deliberate choice of words and phrases. When asked about his inspiration he stated: "I am observing that these words, which sometimes represent objects and meanings, are made of these squiggly little forms we call an alphabet." (Rachel Cooke, Ed Ruscha: There's room for saying things in bright shiny colours, The Guardian, September 2010). Spots illustrates Ruscha’s extensive experimentation with the pictorial and the vernacular while blurring the distinctions between words and images by isolating and recombining them in a singular manner.
Ruscha’s artistic training is rooted in commercial art and at the beginning was associated with Pop art. In 1956 he moved from his natal town of Nebraska to Los Angeles where he was exposed to the work of Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg and Roy Lichtenstein. Since the early 1960s, he has been regularly experimenting with the depiction of words alluding to popular culture and every-day life in Los Angeles. This interest in words ultimately provides him with his core inspirational theme. The non-painterly body of work that Ruscha developed between 1963 and 1975 created the intrinsic value that was later further developed, alongside Barbara Kruger and Jenny Holser, in the use of entire phrases in his works that marked the distinctive characteristic of post-Pop Art.
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.