Ed Ruscha

Gagosian is pleased to present Ed Ruscha Prints and Photographs, a survey of Ruscha’s prints over forty years, together with rarely seen photographs produced since 1959. It is organized by Gagosian director Bob Monk and follows earlier iterations at Gagosian New York and Paris during the last two years. The exhibition will be presented in conjunction with Ed Ruscha Books & Co.

Ranging freely across materials both traditional and unconventional, Ruscha’s printmaking is a fluid forum for his spirited investigation of what a limited-edition artwork can be. Attracted to the reproducibility and happy accidents specific to the medium, Ruscha began making lithographic editions in the early 1960s, infusing the Pop and Conceptual sensibilities of the time with vernacular wit and 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.

The quartet of gas station prints—Standard Station, Mocha Standard, Cheese Mold Standard with Olive, and Double Standard (1966–69)—merges Euclidean space with Renaissance perspective and wordplay, while depictions of the Hollywood sign and its surrounding hills convey an attitude about the region’s landscape, at once scientific and romantic, natural and artificial. “‘Hollywood’ is like a verb to me,” Ruscha once commented. “It’s something you can do to any subject or anything.” His prints of the past four decades are random yet refined expressions of this unrestricted approach.

In the screenprint portfolio News, Mews, Pews, Brews, Stews, Dues (1970), rhyming words appear in Gothic type, printed in edible substances such as pie fillings, Bolognese sauce, caviar, and chocolate syrup. Each word alludes to Ruscha’s impressions of England: “News” symbolizes “a tabloid-minded country,” while “Stews,” made from baked beans, strawberries, chutney, and other foodstuffs, sums up British cooking. During the production of his second short film Miracle (1975), Ruscha used photography as the basis for prints for the first time: the incongruously titled Tropical Fish series of the same year presents banal tabletop still lifes against lustrous fabrics, from Air, Water, Fire—featuring a bicycle pump, seltzer bottle, and Satan statuette—to the chocolates, raw cuts, and bedsheets of Sweets, Meats, Sheets.