Ed Ruscha - Contemporary Art Part II New York Friday, May 14, 2010 | Phillips

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  • Provenance


    Ruth S. Schaffner Gallery, Los Angeles; Private collection, California; Gagosian Gallery, New York

  • Catalogue Essay


    “Well, I was trained and sort of programmed to think like an Abstract Expressionist, and I was part of that for a while…and, looking back, I can see that Abstract Expressionism is vital painting…it’s realy…and I still love it. So I don’t find it foreign to me. But it’s only a step towards my direction. I think an artist has to negate one thing in order to move on to something else. So, it became a question of either loading the brush with color and attacking a canvas that was pure white, or something else…almost preconceived. I took the second way. My paintings were almost dreamed about in advance, rather than painted on the spot. I began to plan my work…funnily enough it all seems to come from a source…even abstract painting, in a way, has an approach and some connection to reality.”
    Ed Ruscha taken from an interview with Bernard Blistène in E. Ruscha, Edward Ruscha: Paintings, Rotterdam, 1990, p. 128

  • 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

Property from the Halsey Minor Collection

207

Three O’Clock

1975
Gunpowder and pastel on paper.
22 3/4 x 28 3/4 in. (57.8 x 73 cm).
Signed and dated "Edward Ruscha 1975" lower right and again on the reverse. This work will be included in a forthcoming volume of Edward Ruscha: Catalogue Raisonné of the Works on Paper.

Estimate
$150,000 - 250,000 

Sold for $170,500

Contemporary Art Part II

14 May 2010
New York