Installation Views
Works Exhibited
About
Deterioration is a fertile area to explore.
—Ed Ruscha
Gagosian is pleased to present an exhibition of new paintings by Ed Ruscha.
Since the 1960s, Ruscha has created a distinctive and ever-expanding lexicon of signs, symbols, images, and words drawn from vernacular America. His visual utterances, sounds, and concepts—such as the roadside gas station or the word “OOF”—have become embedded in the American ethos. He has presented recurring images—the American flag, mountains, books, and words—that are suggestive yet never didactic, and the development of these images over the course of his illustrious career exemplifies the wry refinement and subtlety with which he speaks through painting.
In these new paintings, Ruscha has chosen to revisit the flag, the mountain, and the tire. Flags entered Ruscha’s visual vocabulary between 1985 and 1987, rippling in the breeze over dramatic sunsets or triumphant blue skies, offset with subtle warning cues of black bars resembling censor strips. The motif returned in OUR FLAG (2017)—currently on view at the Brooklyn Museum, which served as a polling site for the November election—where it disintegrated into shreds set against a near-black sky. The flag becomes newly distorted in RIPPLING FLAG (2020), this time abnormally widened to extend past the right-side frame, its flowing surface creating twisted shapes and shadows over the red and white stripes. In Top of Flag (2020), only a fraction of the standard is visible at the bottom of the canvas, surrounded by a gradation of shadow, almost as though the flag were a setting sun or a dimming spotlight on a stage.
#EdRuscha
Flags
Gillian Pistell writes on the loaded symbol of the American flag in the work of postwar and contemporary artists.
Donald Marron
Jacoba Urist profiles the legendary collector.
The Art History of Presidential Campaign Posters
Against the backdrop of the 2020 US presidential election, historian Hal Wert takes us through the artistic and political evolution of American campaign posters, from their origin in 1844 to the present. In an interview with Quarterly editor Gillian Jakab, Wert highlights an array of landmark posters and the artists who made them.
“Things Fall Apart”: Ed Ruscha’s Swiped Words
Lisa Turvey examines the range of effects conveyed by the blurred phrases in recent drawings by the artist, detailing the ways these words in motion evoke the experience of the current moment.
Artists’ Magazines
Gwen Allen recounts her discovery of cutting-edge artists’ magazines from the 1960s and 1970s and explores the roots and implications of these singular publications.
Eilshemius and Me: An Interview with Ed Ruscha
Ed Ruscha tells Viet-Nu Nguyen and Leta Grzan how he first encountered Louis Michel Eilshemius’s paintings, which of the artist’s aesthetic innovations captured his imagination, and how his own work relates to and differs from that of this “Neglected Marvel.”
