Signalling the closing moments of many classic Hollywood films, “The End” has become a phrase synonymous with storytelling and cinema. In Ed Ruscha’s The End the artist takes these two words as his central subject matter in four horizontal holographic panels. Set upon shifting green, blue and violet tones, the black gothic-style typeface is placed at altering heights, varying in clarity and opacity. The End builds on an earlier collection of paintings from the early 1990s that present the same text in a variety of fonts against a range of backgrounds. During this period, Ruscha developed a fascination not only with the textual aspects but also with the materiality of film itself. This interest is evident in both his paintings and the subsequent holographic works, where the scratches and dust spots on the film's celluloid surface become visible. In some instances, the composition is split by the border of the film frame, suggesting a malfunction that undermines the façade of Hollywood perfection.
"What motivated me was memories of the cinema. Watching movies and watching scratches on the film, and those little pops that come here and there, and those little, what they call, “hairs in the gate,” always seemed real curious to me... Movie producers want to keep those scratches out of there. But I like them for what they are." – Ed Ruscha
Since 1956, Ruscha has lived and worked in Los Angeles, a city iconic for contributions to the American film industry. The influence of L.A. and its cinematic connections infuses its way into the present lot, with the four panels compositionally mimicking frames from a roll of film. The holographic form of The End brings a distinctive spin to the series, granting depth to the text and subverting the expectation of its two-dimensionality. With shifting iridescent tones against striking black text, the present lot captivatingly reimagines the familiarity of a film’s concluding moments, as "The End" flashes up on the screen and the final frame flickers.
With text as the primary motif, the work aligns itself with Ruscha’s artistic oeuvre, in which words frequently take centre stage. As one of America’s most influential and successful living artists, Ruscha is known for his iconic word-based artworks – “I just happened to paint words like someone else paints flowers,” he said. His distinctive body of work – falling between the Pop and Conceptual art movements – challenges preconceived verbal and visual constructs. The malleability of text captivated Ruscha, as it allowed him to isolate words against diverse backdrops on various scales and mediums, pushing the boundaries of letters' interaction with space. In isolating the words "The End", Ruscha underscores his fascination with the aesthetic qualities of words and also engages in an exploration of the cultural and emotional resonance embedded in certain phrases.
