Beschreibung:

Ed Ruscha Romance 1980 Oil on canvas. 140 x 146.1 cm. (55 1/8 x 57 1/2 in). Signed and dated ‘Ed Ruscha 1980' on the reverse.
Provenance Ace Gallery, Venice, California; Private Collection Exhibited Vancouver, Ace Gallery, Edward Ruscha: Recent Paintings, June – July, 1981; Nagoya City Museum and Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery, Barnsdall Park, Contemporary Los Angeles Artists, April – May, 1982 (illustrated on the poster and announcement); Los Angeles, County Museum of Art, The Works of Edward Ruscha – Part II: 1973 – 1983, March – May, 1983 (illustrated on the announcement); Pasadena, Art Center College of Design, Alyce de Roulet Williamson Gallery, Romance, November 1994 – February 1995. Literature Ed Ruscha Ace Gallery, Artforum, 1980 (illustrated on the back cover) Catalogue Essay “The clashing of two unlike things: that is the key to all our problems. Introducing another unplanned thing into a fact of life, an antagonistic thing that somehow makes something new.” (Edward Ruscha) Los Angeles native Edward Ruscha has been producing art since 1958. Originally from Nebraska, he carries a deep engrained attachment to American culture, growing up in the mid-west and later moving his base to the Pacific coast. Through his visual connotations, artworks become artwords, playing on scale, perspective, and depth with letters and their relation to painted backgrounds. Ruscha’s move to Los Angeles was a turning point in his life. He left a tight knit conservative mid-western town with a Bible belt mentality and found the spacious area and breeze of the west coast. His big break came in 1962 when the Pasadena Art Museum presented ‘New Painting of Common Objects,’ a show that included rising artists Roy Lichtenstein Andy Warhol Wayne Thiebaud and Phillip Hefferton amongst others which included Ed Ruscha At the same show, Ruscha and best friend Joe Goode were the youngest artists presenting work mostly from a Graphic Design background in comparison to the New York Pop School with Warhol’s imitation paintings and Lichtenstein’s magnified comics. The show helped the pop-art movement gain critical acceptance amongst the art community and the world. A year later Ruscha was again invited to exhibit, this time at the Pop Art-USA exhibit at the Oakland Museum of Art alongside Mel Ramos John Wesley and Wally Hedrick In comparison to other working pop-artists from the 60s generation, Ruscha’s work always eschewed the parodic nature of consumerist pop in favour of a deadpan irony which is just as subversive and perhaps more enduring. His past experiences in commercial sign making, bookbinding, printing, and making photographs has resounded acutely in Ruscha’s career. The artist whose work is commonly referred to as ‘California Art’ explains that ‘what has always been labeled as California art is actually California seen through the lens and eyes of mid-western values. This is common amongst artists who have steered away from their typically conservative backgrounds like Ruscha and others like Paul McCarthy who grew up in Salt Lake City and Jim Dine who came to LA from Ohio. Others include David Hockney who found the pleasing sunshine, swimming pools and palm tree settings adjoined to a liberal attitude on the West Coast far more gratifying than that of the dull Britannic shorelines. The liberating surroundings of LA provided for creative’s to leave behind their numb and torpid backgrounds and allowing them to settle within a refreshingly new stage for un-discovered talent. Ruscha’s first word-art paintings came originally from his love for type and their meaning when placed together to create a word. His first works from 1952 conjoin part paint - part word, normally labeled as graphic design, but here are more like explorations of common day shapes and figures which we find in the newspaper, billboards, and signs in the form of numbers and letters. Packaging and branding were first to be drawn onto canvas by Ruscha but it was clearly in 1962 where he found his clearest and loudest voice by painting works such as Heavy Industry and War Surplus which could easily