Private Collection, Rhineland
Grisebach, Berlin, July 10, 2020, lot 00562
Acquired at the above sale by the present owner
Los Angeles, Gagosian, Ed Ruscha Photographs, March 20–April 19, 2003, pp. 50–53 (another example exhibited and illustrated)
San Francisco, de Young Museum, Ed Ruscha and the Great American West, July 16–October 9, 2016, no. 79, 81, 83, 85, pp. 109, 111–114, 228–229 (another example exhibited and illustrated, pp. 111–114, 228)
Margit Rowell, ed., Cotton Puffs, Q-tips, smoke and mirrors: the drawings of Ed Ruscha, New York, 2004, fig. 27, pp. 22–23 (another example illustrated, p. 22)
Alexandra Schwartz, Ed Ruscha’s Los Angeles, Cambridge, MA, 2010, pp. 125–130 (another example illustrated, pp. 126–129)
Jennifer Quick, Back to the Drawing Board: Ed Ruscha, Art, and Design in the 1960s, New Haven, 2022, figs. 1, 84, pp. 1–2, 124–125 (another example illustrated, pp. 2, 125)
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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