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Ed Ruscha
Vacant Lots
Full-Cataloguing
ED RUSCHA
"Ruscha’s relationship to photography is complex and ambivalent, and the work is difficult to define. The photographs’ amateurish quality and snapshot size intrigued his contemporaries.Neither purely documentary nor purely artistic, their subject matter was stereotypical and banal, with motifs drawn mostly from ordinary outdoor sites in Southern California or the western United States. This, along with their presentation as strings of consecutive images, created a mythical road-movie or photo novel effect laced with Beat Generation innuendo."
(Margit Rowell, Ed Ruscha Photographer, Whitney Museum of American Art and Steidl, 2006, p. 11)
Ed Ruscha
American | 1937Quintessentially 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.