Beschreibung:

Property of an Important European Collector Ed Ruscha The 1990s 《90年代》 2000 signed and dated 'Ed Ruscha 2000' lower right of margin dry pigment and acrylic on paper sheet: 58 x 73 cm (22 7/8 x 28 3/4 in.) Executed in 2000, this work will be included in a forthcoming volume of Edward Ruscha: Catalogue Raisonné of the Works on Paper, edited by Lisa Turvey.
Provenance Gagosian Gallery, New York Private Collection, London Acquired from the above by the present owner Catalogue Essay "What I'm interested in is illustrating ideas." - Ed Ruscha Ed Ruscha’s text-based works have revolutionised the relationship between the visual and the semiotic. Ruscha fully embraced the visual culture of Los Angeles, making him a leading figure in the early emergence of the West Coast scene. Inspired by the text based works of fellow artists Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg Ruscha has pursued a lifelong artistic exploration into the formal elements of printed text and its fluid relationship to the visual image. The present lot, The 1990s, embodies Ruscha’s mature style and is a splendid and imposing composition that fully represents the artist’s determined mastery of colour and form. By culling words, images and phrases that have been imprinted in his memory and that are found in mass media (print culture, advertising billboards, etc.), his work often serves as a visual encyclopedia of American culture and its syntax and symbology. This distinct genesis in print media heavily influenced Ruscha’s eventual aesthetic. In his pieces, words are given a physical voice, and their evocative potential fully realised in clashes between the banal and the majestic. Many of his paintings find a single word or phrase recontextualised in suggestive interplay with typeface and background. “I like the idea of a word becoming a picture, almost leaving its body, then coming back and becoming a word again.” (Ed Ruscha quoted in a lecture at the Getty Centre in Los Angeles, July 17, 1988; quoted in Clive Phillpot and Siri Engberg, Ed Ruscha Editions 1962 - 1999, Volume 2, Minneapolis, 1999, p. 14) As such, Ruscha has pioneered the notion of words as visual abstractions, inducing a physical reaction based on their chosen hue, typography or context. Read More Artist Bio Ed Ruscha American • 1937 Quintessentially American, Ed Ruscha is an L.A.-based artist whose art, like California itself, is both geographically rooted and a metaphor for an American state of mind. Ruscha is a deft creator of photography, film, painting, drawing, prints and artist books, whose works are simultaneously unexpected and familiar, both ironic and sincere. His most iconic works are at turns poetic and deadpan, epigrammatic text with nods to advertising copy, juxtaposed with imagery that is either cinematic and sublime or seemingly wry documentary. Whether the subject is his iconic Standard Gas Station or the Hollywood Sign, a parking lot or highway, his works are a distillation of American idealism, echoing the expansive Western landscape and optimism unique to postwar America. View More Works