Gagosian Paris is pleased to present two exhibitions that explore Ed Ruscha’s innovation and legacy across printed media. The exhibitions are organized by Gagosian director Bob Monk.
Prints and Photographs surveys Ruscha’s prints of the past forty years, together with rarely seen photographs produced since 1959, providing an in-depth examination of the unrestricted gestures that fuel his assiduous art. Ranging freely and dexterously across traditional, unconventional, or sometimes even comestible materials, Ruscha’s prints are a fluid forum for the spirited investigation of what a limited-edition artwork can be. His absorption and rethinking of the requirements of each graphic procedure and format result in step-by-step transformations, in a process that echoes the eternal return of the subjects that make up his broader oeuvre.
Ruscha arrived in Los Angeles in 1956 to study commercial art at the Chouinard Art Institute (now CalArts), and underwent a six-month apprenticeship with a printer beginning in 1958. Attracted to the reproducibility, collaborative processes, and happy accidents specific to printmaking, he began to create lithographic editions, infusing the Pop and Conceptual sensibilities of the time with vernacular wit and existential melancholy. His exquisitely refined prints engage a breadth of formal themes, from text and typography to still life and quotidian architecture, played out in a spirit of rigorous yet restless experimentation.
Ruscha’s early photographs also provided foundations for his broader artistic practice. Isolating overlooked everyday subjects, he used the camera to “flatten” the images he intended to draw and paint, from apartment buildings to commodities and comestibles such as raisins and bottles of turpentine. Exercises in the ambiguity of scale, such as Untitled (Newspaper Sculpture) (1959–60, printed in 2005) and Dodgers Stadium (1967, printed in 2013), reveal a common abstraction in small objects and large-scale architecture, while Joyce Wallace’s Automatic Table Arrangement (1962, printed in 2005) shows Ruscha’s compositional mind at work. Roof Top Views (1961) pictures local suburban streets from a high vantage point, while Roof Top Views 50 Years Later (2003) returns to the same locations to reveal neighborhoods only subtly changed by the sluggish pace of time, economy, and demographics.
