“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 RuschaA 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 western 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 his 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 RuschaIn 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 works 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 collaborating for many years, in 1990 Ruscha established Hamilton Press together with Ed Hamilton, the master printer of the renowned Tamarind lithography workshop. Having worked on about forty prints together, they collaborated to create a fine art publishing house where artists can produce original editioned artworks. While technically focused on the medium of lithography, it is the spirit of collaboration between artist and printmaker that Hamilton Press is inspired by and dedicated to. In the History Prints, we see this collaboration materialise through the expert coalescence of content and technique: the print process augments Ruscha’s distinct landscapes with a graphic tactility and a rich profusion of colour, from deep plums and fiery tangerines to icy blues and crisp whites. Through lithography, we see Ruscha transform these monumental mountain scenes into his distinctive vernacular visual language.
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.
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History Kids, from Mountain Prints
2013
Lithograph in colours, on BFK Rives paper, with full margins.
I. 61.1 x 61 cm (24 x 24 in.)
S. 73.7 x 71.5 cm (29 x 28 1/8 in.)
Signed, dated and numbered 48/60 in pencil on the front (there were also 21 artist's proofs and 18 colour trial proofs), dedicated 'For the History Kid Nick' (Nicholas Serota, former director of the Tate) in pencil on the reverse, co-published by Hamilton Press, Santa Monica (with their blindstamp), and Tate Modern, London, unframed.
Estimate
£25,000 - 35,000
Sold for £60,960
EditionsLondon@phillips.com
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Rebecca Tooby-Desmond
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Senior International Specialist, Editions
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Evening & Day Editions
London Auction 23 - 24 January 2025
59
This lot is no longer available.
