Private Collection, Europe
E. Ruscha, Twentysix Gasoline Stations, 1963
The Works of Edward Ruscha, Museum of Modern Art, 1982, p. 33
Edward Ruscha: Editions 1959-1999, Catalogue Raisonné, vol. 1, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, 1999, pp. 53-55, pls. 187-196
S. Wall, Ed Ruscha and Photography, Whitney Museum of American Art/ Steidl, 2004, pls. 125, 127-128, 261
M. Rowell, Ed Ruscha: Photographer, Whitney Museum of American Art/ Steidl, 2006, pp. 93-96
M. Richards, Ed Ruscha, Tate Publishing, 2008, pp. 32-33
D. Campany, The Open Road: Photography and the American Road Trip, Aperture, 2014, pp. 55-57, 59
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.
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