Ed Ruscha: New York
Throughout the month of May, New York has turned their eyes to Ed Ruscha, an artist who has long commented on contemporary America. He has completed his first public commission in the city, with work also on display at the Gagosian Gallery.
From the outset of his career, Ruscha has employed unconventional materials in his work. During the 1990s, he began making small paintings using bleach on binder’s linen, stretched over board, like found books. Using bleach, he removed his own words, one by one, leaving a series of cryptic blank blocks where they once appeared. By suppressing content, he gave each painting its own indecipherable secret.
Ruscha has created a series of new small-scale bleach on linen paintings display typically cryptic snatches of language. Picked out against sombre grey, blue, and maroon linen, ghostly letters loom against dark grounds. On closer scrutiny, incidental sprays, spots, and spatters appear, mapping the random gestures and uncontrollable incursions during the working process. Exchanging paint and canvas for bleach and bookcloth, Ruscha continues to mine the relationship between image and word, original and readymade.
Gagosian Gallery in New York presents these bleached works in an exhibition titled Ed Ruscha: Prints and Photographs. The new works are accompanied by a major survey of Ruscha’s prints produced over the last 40 years, and a selection of photographs taken in the 1960s and printed in 2003.
To accompany the exhibition a public commission has seen a mural of his work revealed in the heart of the city. Ruscha’s 1977 drawing Honey, I Twisted Through More Damn Traffic Today, has been reconceived and painted onto an apartment building adjacent to the High Line on West 22nd Street and 10th Avenue.
Ed Ruscha: Prints and Photographs on display at Gagosian Gallery on Madison Avenue in New York until Saturday 14 June 2014.
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