Ed Ruscha - Contemporary Art Day Sale New York Friday, May 16, 2014 | Phillips

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  • Provenance

    Gagosian Gallery, Los Angeles
    Mark Moore Gallery, Santa Monica
    Gallery Seomi, Seoul
    Kukje Gallery, Seoul
    Max Lang Gallery, New York
    Mark Neuberger Collection, New York
    Sotheby's New York, Contemporary Art Day Sale, May 16, 2007, lot 301
    Private Collection, Belgium

  • Exhibited

    Seoul, Seomi Gallery, Edward Ruscha, 1996

  • Literature

    This work will be included in a forthcoming volume of Edward Ruscha: Catalogue Raisonné of Paintings, Volume Five, 1993-1997, pp.254-255.

  • Catalogue Essay

    Executed in nuances of black, blue and white, Doric, Ed Ruscha’s dramatic 1996 painting, belongs to a recent body of work influenced by the secondary effects of light as well as the seminal Abstract Expressionist painter Franz Kline. Ruscha recalls having been in school and “thinking how great it was that this man [Kline] only worked with black and white.” (E. Ruscha quoted in R. D. Marshall, Ed Ruscha, New York, p. 210) Taking the monochromatic palette as his inspiration, Ruscha executed a number of works done only in these subdued but powerful tonalities. As opposed to the incredibly expressive brushiness of Kline’s paintings, however, Ruscha applies his own anti-painterly technique in order “to produce a fat, photographic finish.” As he stated, “The dark paintings came mostly from photography, although they are not photographically done or anything. I feel that they are related to the subject of photography. They are dark and strokeless. They’re painted with an airbrush.” (Ibid., p. 211) In this way, the blurred architectural photographs of the vaunted contemporary photographer Hiroshi Sugimoto come immediately to mind. Both elaborating and exalting in the beauty of negative space and the representation of ephemeral atmospherics, Doric, 1996, elucidates the particular, and peculiar, ability of painting to establish an alternative reality in the immediacy of its evanescence not readily established elsewhere. Leaving out his hallmark text, Doric, 1996, exudes visual allure and power through its stoic silence and serves as an important investigation of the artist’s parallel interests in the command of language and the seductive appeal of film throughout Ruscha’s oeuvre.

  • 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

236

Doric

1996
acrylic on canvas
54 x 40 1/8 in. (137.2 x 102 cm.)
Signed, titled and dated "Ed Ruscha Doric 1996" on the reverse.

Estimate
$300,000 - 500,000 

Sold for $629,000

Contact Specialist
Amanda Stoffel
Head of Day Sale
astoffel@phillips.com
+1 212 940 1261

Contemporary Art Day Sale

New York 16 May 2014 11am