Private Collection (acquired directly from the artist in 1999)
Sotheby’s, New York, March 6, 2020, lot 17
Acquired at the above sale by the present owner
Honolulu Academy of Arts, California: 3 by 8 Twice, February 3–March 5, 1978
London, Anthony d’Offay Gallery, Ed Ruscha, June 26–July 27, 1998
Sydney, Museum of Contemporary Art; Rome, Museo Nazionale delle Arti dei XXi Secolo, Ed Ruscha, March 18–October 3, 2004
Edinburgh, Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Ed Ruscha: Paintings, Drawings, Photographs, Books, November 3, 2004–January 16, 2005
Ed Ruscha, They Called Her Styrene, London, 2000, n.p. (illustrated)
Catrìona Black, “Ed Ruscha,” Sunday Herald, November 14, 2004, online
Lisa Turvey, ed., Edward Ruscha: Catalogue Raisonné of the Works on Paper, Volume Two: 1977–1997, New York, 2018, no. D1977.19, p. 55 (illustrated)
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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