galleryplatform.la
Ed Ruscha
Drum Skins
May 28–June 30, 2020
There’s a peculiar kind of patois, like Okie jargon. People have a funny way of speaking, almost like using bad English, double negatives like, “I can’t find my keys nowhere.” . . . Yes, they were incorrect, but they had a punch to them.
—Ed Ruscha
Gagosian is pleased to present recent paintings by Ed Ruscha online for galleryplatform.la. The works are currently featured in the solo exhibition Drum Skins at the Blanton Museum of Art at the University of Texas at Austin. The museum is currently closed due to the ongoing health crisis, but the show can be explored through a 360° virtual tour.
Fifty years ago, Ruscha purchased a set of vellum drum skins from a leather shop in Los Angeles. He has continued to collect these vintage objects, and since 2011 he has used them as canvases for the works on view at the Blanton Museum of Art. In these paintings, Ruscha wraps a slangy phrase—each one chock full of double and triple negatives—around the perimeter of a drum skin. The resulting compositions are fresh and evocative, while also harking back to the crisp, colorful text paintings about the idiosyncrasies of West Coast life for which Ruscha is known. Here, however, he looks back to his earlier hometown of Oklahoma City, evoking the Americana of his youth with fondness and wit. The drum skin paintings possess a warm nostalgia that transports the artist’s fine-tuned visual language back to a simpler time and place.
In 1980, Larry Gagosian opened his first gallery in Los Angeles. In the forty years since, the gallery has continued to celebrate the city’s vibrant arts scene. We are thrilled to be among the founding members of galleryplatform.la, and we look forward to broadening our contribution to Los Angeles’s artistic community through this new initiative.
#EdRuscha
Installation view, Ed Ruscha: Drum Skins, Blanton Museum of Art, University of Texas at Austin, January 11–October 4, 2020. Artwork © Ed Ruscha
Related News
Honor
Ed Ruscha
California Hall of Fame
Ed Ruscha will be inducted into the California Hall of Fame for his service to the arts in a ceremony taking place on Tuesday, December 13, 2022, at which he will receive a medal from California Governor Gavin Newsom. Established in 2006 at the California Museum in Sacramento by former Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and First Lady Maria Shriver, the award honors legendary Californians who embody the state’s innovative spirit and have made their mark on history across a variety of fields, including the arts, education, business and labor, science, sports, philanthropy, and public service.
Ed Ruscha in his studio, Los Angeles, 2008. Photo: Kate Simon
In Conversation
Adam McEwen, Bob Monk, and Lisa Turvey on Ed Ruscha
Tuesday, September 22, 2020, 5pm EDT
On the occasion of Artist Spotlight: Ed Ruscha, join artist Adam McEwen, Gagosian director Bob Monk, and Lisa Turvey, editor of the catalogue raisonné of Ed Ruscha’s works on paper, for an online conversation. The trio will discuss how Ruscha has experimented with the sound, appearance, and sense of language to imbue his works on paper with humor and pathos. To join, register at zoom.us.
Ed Ruscha, CERTAIN FACTS, 2020 © Ed Ruscha. Photo: Fredrik Nilsen
Artist Spotlight
Ed Ruscha
September 16–22, 2020
At the start of his artistic career, Ed Ruscha called himself an “abstract artist . . . who deals with subject matter.” Abandoning academic connotations that came to be associated with Abstract Expressionism, he looked instead to tropes of advertising and brought words—as form, symbol, and material—to the forefront of painting. Working in diverse media with humor and wit, he oscillates between sign and substance, locating the sublime in landscapes both natural and artificial. Ruscha’s formal experimentations and clever use of the American vernacular have evolved in form and meaning as technology alters the essence of human communication.
Photo: Kate Simon
In Conversation
Irving Blum and Dorothy Lichtenstein
In celebration of the centenary of Roy Lichtenstein’s birth, Irving Blum and Dorothy Lichtenstein sat down to discuss the artist’s life and legacy, and the exhibition Lichtenstein Remembered: Curated by Irving Blum, at Gagosian in New York.
Now available
Gagosian Quarterly Fall 2023
The Fall 2023 issue of Gagosian Quarterly is now available, featuring Derrick Adams’s Everything and a Ring (2023) on its cover.
Art&Newport
Writers and curators Dodie Kazanjian and Alison Gingeras spoke with the Quarterly’s Alison McDonald about the arts organization Art&Newport and the possibilities the historic Rhode Island town offers contemporary artists. Their current exhibition, Games, Gamblers & Cartomancers: The New Cardsharps, on view through October 1, 2023, examines the varied custom of card play and includes artists such as John Currin, Hadi Falapishi, and Katie Stout.
Tombs of Beauty
Mike Stinavage talks to director Alice Rohrwacher about her latest film, La Chimera, which premiered at Cannes in the spring and will screen at the New York Film Festival in October 2023.
Assemblage: Heidi and Christian Batteau
Wife-and-husband team Heidi and Christian Batteau launched their bespoke wallcovering company, Assemblage, in 2013. Building on their educations in fine art and working alongside a studio of exceptional artisans, the couple has steadily grown their award-winning, museum-collected creations from their repurposed seed mill in Arkansas. Here, they speak with the Quarterly’s Wyatt Allgeier about their inspirations, their techniques, and their partnership with Holly Hunt throughout the United States and Europe.
The Importance of Elsewhere: on Ashley Bickerton
This documentary film includes footage of Ashley Bickerton as he gives a tour of his Bali studio during his final year, as well as interviews with artists Matthew Barney, Mark Dion, Damien Hirst, Jamian Juliano-Villani, Jon Kessler, and writer Paul Theroux.
In Conversation
Helen Marden and Kiki Smith
Ahead of her exhibition in Athens this fall, Helen Marden met with longtime friend Kiki Smith at Marden’s home in New York’s West Village to discuss the bravery of color and the power of intuition.
Sarah Sze: Timelapse
In this video, Sarah Sze elaborates on the creation of her solo exhibition Timelapse, on view through September 10, 2023. The show features a series of site-specific installations throughout the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, that explore her ongoing reflection on how our experience of time and place is continuously reshaped in relationship to the constant stream of objects, images, and information in today’s digitally and materially saturated world. In Sze’s reimagination of the Guggenheim’s iconic architecture, designed in the 1940s by Frank Lloyd Wright, the building becomes a public timekeeper reminding us that timelines are built through shared experience and memory.
Tetsuya Ishida: My Weak Self, My Pitiful Self, My Anxious Self
The largest exhibition of the Japanese artist Tetsuya Ishida’s work ever mounted in the United States will open at Gagosian, New York, in September 2023. Curated by Cecilia Alemani, the show tracks the full scope of Ishida’s career. In this excerpt from Alemani’s essay in the exhibition catalogue, she contextualizes Ishida’s paintings against the background of a fraught era in Japan’s history and investigates the work’s enduring relevance in our own time.
Jennifer Guidi: Mountain Range
In this video, produced by Château La Coste, Jennifer Guidi discusses her latest solo exhibition, Mountain Range, conceived in response to the architecture of Château La Coste’s Richard Rogers Gallery and the surrounding landscape of Provence in the South of France. The exhibition, organized in collaboration with Gagosian, is now on view through September 3, 2023.
Douglas Gordon: if when why what
Douglas Gordon took over the Piccadilly Lights advertising screen in London’s Piccadilly Circus, as well as a global network of screens in cities including Berlin, Melbourne, Milan, New York, and Seoul, nightly for three minutes at 20:22 (8:22pm) throughout December 2022, with his new film, if when why what (2018–22). The project was presented by the Cultural Institute of Radical Contemporary Art (CIRCA) in conjunction with the exhibition Douglas Gordon: Neon Ark at Gagosian, Davies Street, London.
Roy and Irving
Actor and art collector Steve Martin reflects on the friendship and professional partnership between Roy Lichtenstein and art dealer Irving Blum.