Ed Ruscha - Editions & Works on Paper New York Tuesday, April 16, 2024 | Phillips

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  • “I had a notion to make pictures by using words and presenting them in some way and it seemed like a mountain was an archetypal stage set. It was a perfect foil for whatever was happening in the foreground.”
    —Ed Ruscha

    A master of vernacular and form, Ed Ruscha has been well regarded for his superimposition of text upon landscape since the 1980s, when the artist developed a visual language of juxtaposing the symbolic stimulus of the image with text that generates an atmosphere of speech, sound, and shape. Long associated with the vast flatness of the plains, the buildings cluttered on Sunset Boulevard, or the monumental horizontality of the Hollywood sign, Ruscha’s mountain prints see him embrace a new kind of landscape: glistening, snowcapped summits set against Ruscha’s signature gradated sunsets captured in photorealist detail. While these peaks are based on photographs, Ruscha described them as “mountains of the mind,” elaborating that they function as “anonymous backdrops for the drama of words.” 

    “Words have temperatures to me. When they reach a certain point and become hot words, then they appeal to me. Sometimes I have a dream that if a word gets too hot and too appealing, it will boil apart, and I won’t be able to read or think of it.”
    —Ed Ruscha

    In his mountain prints, Ruscha’s cryptic and humorously banal phrases rendered in his hallmark “Boy Scout Utility Modern” typeface interrupt the harmony of the scenic backdrop and obfuscate its view. The positioning of these enigmatic words, on square-format paper that accentuates the central placement of the text, is reminiscent of the mundanity of road signage in a picturesque landscape, a reassurance of human presence: “I like the oddity of nature in the background,” Ruscha remarked. At once sublime and absurd, these mountain prints grow from the Romantic canon of mountain scenes, like the canvases of Caspar David Friedrich, the landscapes of the Hudson River School, or the photographs of Ansel Adams; Ruscha undercuts the accustomed spiritualism of these pictures with his punchily “hot” two-word phrases.

     

    Albert Bierstadt, Sunrise on the Matterhorn, after 1875, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Image: © The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Gift of Mrs. Karl W. Koeniger, 1966, 66.114

    After a collaboration over many decades, Ruscha established Hamilton Press in Venice, California with Tamarind master printer Ed Hamilton in 1990, desiring to focus on traditional lithography. Ruscha’s color trial proofs in the present sale suggests the ways in which the open exchange of skills and insights between artist and printer has impacted his striking compositions. Like the partnership between Hamilton and Ruscha, the ultimate achievement of the edition is its expert coalescence of content and technique: the print process augments Ruscha’s distinct landscapes with a graphic tactility and a rich profusion of color, from deep plums to fiery tangerines. The color trial proofs not only illustrate this coalescence, but underline the experimental nature of printmaking, how subtle shifts in an ombre sky can embody an entirely new spirit.   

    • Provenance

      Gagosian Gallery, Beverly Hills
      Acquired from the above by the present owner, 2016

    • 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

160

Wall Rocket, from Mountain Prints

2013
Unique lithograph in colors, on Rives BFK paper, with full margins.
I. 24 x 24 in. (61 x 61 cm)
S. 29 x 28 in. (73.7 x 71.1 cm)

Signed, dated and numbered 'C.T.P. 11' in pencil (one of 19 color trial proofs, the regular edition was 60 and 21 artist's proofs), published by Hamilton Press, Santa Monica (with their blindstamp), framed.

Full Cataloguing

Estimate
$30,000 - 50,000 

Sold for $69,850

Contact Specialist

editions@phillips.com
212-940-1220

Editions & Works on Paper

New York Auction 16 - 17 April