Ed Ruscha - Editions & Works on Paper New York Tuesday, April 18, 2023 | Phillips

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  • “That gas station had a polished newness that I just had to draw and then paint and then silkscreen and finally make into a book.” —Ed Ruscha

    This novel edition of Ghost Station is the most recent exploration of Ruscha's signature Standard gas stations. Indeed, the most iconic image of his career, and a decades-long obsession, Ruscha has repeatedly revisited this subject, exploring Americana through the topography of the highway. As a young man, driving back and forth in his 1950 Ford Sedan, along route 66 between his hometown of Oklahoma City and Hollywood, Ruscha first turned his camera out onto these fuel stops.

    “Route 66…It was like a continuous ribbon, it was like a real magical formula for keeping my life going.”
    —Ed Ruscha

    Playing with (in)visibility, Ghost Station is an inkless, Mixografia® print. The image is an outlined echo of its original rendering in the 1963 oil painting Standard Station, Amarillo, Texas. As such, the Mixografia® technique continues Ruscha's relationship with inventive printmaking. Here he leaves behind color and engages with purely material innovation. Unlike traditional embossing, Mixografia® allows for a three-dimensional print with "elements of relief, texture, and very fine surface detail." To achieve this three-dimensional relief, a wet cotton paper pulp was cast in the Mixografia® signature, hand-made copper plate mold and run through the press under high pressure. As a result, the work blurs the boundary between image and sculpture while also pushing the definition of an image as something that may not necessitate a color substrate of any kind, instead allowing an interplay of angular shadows to draw out the pitstop's graphic architecture. Ruscha's image of the station first encountered 60 years ago has therefore transformed into a 'Ghost,' both impressed within his memories and into the paper.

    • Provenance

      Mixografia, Los Angeles
      Acquired from the above by the present owner, 2011

    • 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 a Private Collection

103

Ghost Station

2011
Mixografia® inkless print, on handmade paper, with full margins.
I. 20 7/8 x 39 1/2 in. (53 x 100.3 cm)
S. 27 1/4 x 45 5/8 in. (69.2 x 115.9 cm)

Signed, dated and numbered 48/85 in pencil (there were also 24 artist's proofs), published by Mixografía, Los Angeles, framed.

Full Cataloguing

Estimate
$30,000 - 50,000 

Sold for $72,390

Contact Specialist

Editions@phillips.com
212 940 1220

 

Editions & Works on Paper

New York Auction 18 - 20 April 2023