Ed Ruscha and The Great American West
At 77 years old, legendary artist Ed Ruscha continues to produce works depicting the great American West that he began creating in 1956. He maintains a studio in the Californian desert, which he regularly travels through, immersing himself in the sparse, evocative and occasionally absurd landscapes. These are the very landscapes that inspired him as a young man to create the pieces that he is renowned for, and what are now part of a new exhibition, Ed Ruscha and The Great American West, at the de Young Museum, in San Francisco, California.
“I could see I was just born for the job, born to watch paint dry,” Ruscha told The New Yorker in 2013. It was in 1956, at the age of 18, when Ruscha left his home in Oklahoma, and drove a 1950 Ford sedan to Los Angeles, where he had been accepted to the Chouinard Art Institute. His trip roughly followed the fabled Route 66 through the Southwest, which featured many of the sights – auto repair shops, billboards and long stretches of highway punctuated by telephone poles of the West Coast – that provided him with his artistic subjects. While the call of the East Coast and New York City was loud – Leo Castelli was his New York dealer for 12 years – it was LA, his muse, that he couldn’t leave alone.
Ed Ruscha and The Great American West will explore Ruscha’s engagement with the American West and its starring role in American mythology. The exhibition’s nine sections will reveal Ruscha’s fascination with these evolving landscape and iconic character of this great American West in symbolic, evocative, and ironic renditions. These include works that depict the region as it is experienced through the windshield of a car—a vast, wide-open prospect—and others that display Ruscha’s interest in built environments such as tacky buildings like those along the Sunset Strip, or the endless asphalt of urban sprawls.
A Particular Kind of Heaven (1963), is one of the exhibition’s highlights, and where we see his prominent pop art sensibility. He is renowned for making a single word, like his most famous piece Hollywood (1963) the iconised signage painted in his ‘technicolour’ rendition, or phrase the sole subject of an artwork like Artists Who Make “Pieces” (1976). These pieces appear in a variety of forms such as poured liquids, cut ribbons, spray paint, or a favorite typeface that Ruscha calls Boy Scout utility modern, and they symbolize the romantic aura of the film industry as well as its excesses, obsessions and anxieties.
The gasoline station has long been an important element of Ruscha’s work, and a photograph taken in 1963, Standard Station, Amarillo, Texas, became the basis for several of his best-known paintings and prints. These are also on show.
The exhibition concludes with works that include the words The End, possibly alluding to the end of cinematic illusion, the end of a romantic vision of the West, or the literal end of a continent, the edge of the Pacific Ocean, where Route 66 ends. It is fantastically enigmatic.
Ed Ruscha and The Great American West is on now at the de Young Museum until Sunday 9 October 2016.
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