Museum Exhibition Catalogues, Monographs, Artist's Projects, Curatorial Writings and Essays
"Mr. Ruscha's palette is garish and desaturated, clean-lined and baroque. His art is nakedly polemical and fully abstract. His painted words tell us what to think and simultaneously retreat to hushed suggestion. A sense of apocalypse looms; chaos impends, but never runs nihilistic." James Ellroy, excerpted from Ed Ruscha: Fifty Years of Painting.
Ed Ruscha was born in 1937 in Omaha, Nebraska and grew up in Oklahoma City. In 1956 he moved to Los Angeles, where he attended the Chouinard Art Institute. He has made pioneering work in the media of painting, printmaking, drawing, bookmaking, photography and film since 1958. Associated in the early years with the Ferus Gallery, he was included in Walter Hopps' landmark Pop art show, New Painting of Common Objects at the Pasadena Art Museum in 1962. His work has been the subject of exhibits at the Centre George Pompidou, Paris, the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, and the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles. A mid-career retrospective of Ruscha's work travels from the Hayward Gallery in London to Munich's Haus der Kunst and then to Stockholm's Moderna Museet from 2009 - 2010.
Edited by Benoit Buquet, Jean-Pierre Criqui, Larisa Dryansky. Text by Robert Dean, Briony Fer, Michel Gauthier, Elizabeth A. Kessler, Anne Moeglin-Delcroix, Linda Norden, Margit Rowell, Ed Ruscha, John Tain, Lisa Turvey, Cécile Whiting.
Revelatory readings of Ruscha’s oeuvre by renowned writers and critics as well as figures close to the artist
Pbk, 6 x 8.25 in. / 224 pgs / 30 color / 30 bw. | 6/24/2025 | Awaiting stock $29.95
Edited with text by Christophe Cherix, with Ana Torok and Kiko Aebi. Text by Benjamin H.D. Buchloh, Donna De Salvo and Linda Norden, Michael Govan, Ellen Lupton and Jennifer Tobias, Andrew Perchuk, Jeffrey Weiss.
A sweeping cross-media survey of Ruscha’s six-decade career, from paintings and works on paper to photographs and artist's books, with essays by leading scholars
Hbk, 9 x 10.5 in. / 340 pgs / 265 color. | 10/3/2023 | In stock $75.00
Since his first road trip from Oklahoma City to Los Angeles in 1956, West coast Pop artist Ed Ruscha has been influenced by themes and icons surrounding cars, roads, signs and travel. Through the end of this week, the Modern Art Museum Fort Worth presents Ed Ruscha: Road Tested, an exhibition—organized by Chief Curator Michael Auping—which brings together approximately 75 works by Ruscha that explore these themes in a variety of media. Auping's interview with Ruscha, conducted in November, 2009 in Venice, California, is reproduced from the exhibition's stunning new catalog. read the full post
Published by JRP|Editions. Edited by Benoit Buquet, Jean-Pierre Criqui, Larisa Dryansky. Text by Robert Dean, Briony Fer, Michel Gauthier, Elizabeth A. Kessler, Anne Moeglin-Delcroix, Linda Norden, Margit Rowell, Ed Ruscha, John Tain, Lisa Turvey, Cécile Whiting.
Since the mid-1960s, Ed Ruscha (born 1937) has developed iconic bodies of work in painting, photography, bookmaking and film. Conceived as a reader to Ruscha’s practice, this publication brings together original contributions and case studies by an international array of renowned art critics and writers including Robert Dean, Lisa Turvey, Cécile Whiting, Jean-Pierre Criqui, Anne Moeglin-Delcroix, Benoît Buquet, Briony Fer, Linda Norden, Michel Gauthier, Elizabeth A. Kessler, Margit Rowell and John Tain. Among the specific areas discussed are Ruscha’s early drawings, his relationship to literature and the Pictures Generation, and the legacy of his artist’s book practice. Figures close to the artist propose their own subjective readings of his work as a way to renew our understanding of it. The volume includes a previously unpublished text by the artist and a visual essay by Jean-Pierre Criqui spanning Ruscha’s entire oeuvre.
Published by The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Edited with text by Christophe Cherix, with Ana Torok and Kiko Aebi. Text by Benjamin H.D. Buchloh, Donna De Salvo and Linda Norden, Michael Govan, Ellen Lupton and Jennifer Tobias, Andrew Perchuk, Jeffrey Weiss.
Spanning 65 years of Ed Ruscha’s remarkable career and mirroring his own cross-disciplinary approach, Ed Ruscha / Now Then features over 250 objects, produced from 1958 to the present, including paintings, drawings, prints, films, photographs, artist’s books and installations. Published to accompany the most comprehensive presentation of the artist’s work to date, and his first solo exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, this richly illustrated catalog highlights Ruscha’s most acclaimed works alongside lesser-known aspects of his practice. Essays by an interdisciplinary group of contributors examine Ruscha’s work under a new light, beyond the categories of Pop and Conceptual art with which he has traditionally been associated, to present fresh perspectives on one of the most influential figures in postwar American art. Taken together, they underscore Ruscha’s singular contributions, including his material exploration of language, experiments with unconventional mediums—such as gunpowder, chocolate or chewing tobacco—and his groundbreaking self-published books. Supplemented by an illustrated chronology and exhibition history, this publication captures the ceaseless reinvention that has defined his prolific, six-decade career. Ed Ruscha (born 1937) was raised in Oklahoma City and moved to Los Angeles in 1956, where he attended the Chouinard Art Institute (now CalArts). First showing with the Ferus Gallery in the early 1960s, Ruscha was included in Walter Hopps' landmark Pop art show New Painting of Common Objects at the Pasadena Art Museum in 1962. He has since shown his work extensively, most recently in several medium-specific museum surveys, including the 2004 exhibition Cotton Puffs, Q-Tips®, Smoke and Mirrors: The Drawings of Ed Ruscha at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, which traveled to the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, and the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, and the 2009 exhibition Ed Ruscha: Fifty Years of Painting at the Hayward Gallery, London, which traveled to the Haus der Kunst, Munich, and Moderna Museet, Stockholm. In 2005, he represented the United States at the 51st Venice Biennale. Ruscha lives and works in Los Angeles.
With his iconic interpretations of American society and imagery, Ed Ruscha (born 1937) stands out as one of the most prominent figures of 20th-century American art. Ruscha's art is closely associated with his cool, elegant representations of stylized gas stations, Hollywood logos and archetypal landscapes.
Since the beginning of the 1960s, no other artist has so radically interpreted the development of modern visual culture in and around Los Angeles, the city where the artist still lives and works. Deriving his motifs from the perspective of the road, the windshield and the movie screen, Ruscha's work gives a distinctive sense of LA as a huge, flat city space located in the desert.
Ed Ruscha: Very brings together works on paper from the UBS Art Collection for an international retrospective, surveying Ruscha's work from its beginnings in 1960 onward, with particular attention to the technically and graphically innovative approaches that the artist has implemented over the years.
Published by Steidl/Gagosian Gallery. Edited by Robert Dean, Lisa Turvey. Text by Thierry de Duve, Linda Norden.
This seventh volume in the ongoing documentation of Ed Ruscha’s (born 1937) entire corpus of paintings covers the years 2004 to 2011, comprising 230 paintings and studies that are reproduced in color and accompanied by detailed exhibition and bibliographic histories. The work of this period extends various earlier series, including Ruscha’s “mountain” paintings, a number of which now incorporate texts from Jack Kerouac’s novel On the Road. Other important works take decay, waste and retrieval and the passage of time as themes, notably the Course of Empire series (Ruscha’s contribution to the 51st Venice Biennale) and the Psycho Spaghetti Western paintings.
This 550-page volume, copublished by Gagosian Gallery and Steidl, is edited by Robert Dean with Lisa Turvey and includes essays by Thierry de Duve and Linda Norden. Each volume of the catalogue has a stitched binding and a cloth cover with silver-colored embossing protected by a printed slipcase.
Published by Edward Tyler Nahem Fine Art. Text by Dieter Buchhart, Alexandra Schwartz, Glenn O'Brien.
The is the first publication to focus on Ed Ruscha’s (born 1937) Ribbon Word works, begun in 1966. It features reproductions of more than 50 masterpieces, along with three essays by the show’s curator Dieter Buchhart, as well as contributions by Glenn O’Brien and Alexandra Schwartz, highlighting the works’ wide array of subtle color and nuanced drawing technique, and showing how Ruscha’s paper ribbons became three-dimensional, illusionistic objects. Ruscha developed this body of work from calligraphic lines and cursive handwriting in order to give his drawings the appearance of three-dimensional forms. His imaginary ribbon-word objects provoke multiple cultural meanings as they suggest sculptures modeled by light. Ruscha’s breathtaking work, using an inimitable trompe l’oeil technique with the application of gunpowder, constitutes a major contribution to 20th-century art.
PUBLISHER Edward Tyler Nahem Fine Art
BOOK FORMAT Hardcover, 11 x 8.5 in. / 112 pgs / 65 color.
PUBLISHING STATUS Pub Date 8/23/2016 Active
DISTRIBUTION D.A.P. Exclusive Catalog: FALL 2016 p. 100
PRODUCT DETAILS ISBN 9780996918114TRADE List Price: $65.00 CAD $87.00 GBP £57.00
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Published by Richter Verlag. Text by Armin Zweite.
The combination of pictorial motifs and words or sentences has long been a special feature of Ed Ruscha’s (born 1937) paintings. As he himself commented in an interview in 1989: "Words are pattern-like, and in their horizontality they answer my investigation into landscape ... they are almost not words--they are objects that become words." This attraction to combinations of word and image has naturally disposed Ruscha toward the book as an art form, and as both an object and subject in his paintings. This volume commemorates a bequest of paintings, photographs and books by Ruscha to the Museum Brandhorst in Munich, complementing their existing works. It offers a representative selection of books published by Ruscha, ranging from the legendary Twentysix Gasoline Stations (1962) to On the Road (2009)--a new edition, designed and illustrated by Ruscha, of Jack Kerouac’s 1957 novel.
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BOOK FORMAT Clth, 11.5 x 9 in. / 70 pgs / 21 color / 12 bw.
PUBLISHING STATUS Pub Date 1/31/2015 Active
DISTRIBUTION D.A.P. Exclusive Catalog: SPRING 2014 p. 116
PRODUCT DETAILS ISBN 9783941263574TRADE List Price: $49.95 CAD $67.50
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This sixth volume of Edward Ruscha: Catalogue Raisonné of the Paintings documents the 227 paintings and studies for paintings made between 1998 and 2003. Though a number of these works refer in some degree to Ruscha's output of the past two decades, the period inaugurates two major series--the Metro Plots, which diagram streets in Los Angeles and American cities, and the celebrated Mountain paintings. A third series, loosely grouped, takes books as its subject. This period is also notable for the appearance of the first of the Course of Empire paintings, with which the artist would represent the United States at the 51st Venice Biennale in 2005. As in previous volumes, included are numerous documentary photographs, a selection of Ruscha's sketchbook pages and complete bibliographic references and exhibition histories.
Published by Steidl. Contributions by Christian Muller.
This is the catalogue for Ed Ruscha's exhibition Los Angeles Apartments, held at the Kunstmuseum Basel in 2013. In 1965, Ed Ruscha published Some Los Angeles Apartments, the third of his ongoing series of photographic books, and completed a group of ten related drawings that depict examples of the ubiquitous Southern California apartment building. The exhibition showed the preparatory studies for these drawings which were recently acquired by the Department of Prints and Drawings at the Kunstmuseum Basel. They are based directly on the photographs Ruscha made of the apartment buildings. Also included are photographs from Ruscha's Gasoline Stations series of 1962, one of which served as a model for the painting of Standard Station, Amarillo, Texas, of 1963. By immediately juxtaposing preparatory studies, drawings and photographs, Ruscha's working method is clearly highlighted and the significance of photography for his passage between abstraction and realism made evident.
Published by Kunsthaus Bregenz. Edited by Yilmaz Dziewior. Text by Beatrice von Bismarck, Douglas Coupland, Yilmaz Dziewior, W. S. Di Piero.
Reading Ed Ruscha focuses on California-based artist Ed Ruscha’s (born 1937) interests in books, writing and the act of reading--and his particular relationship with artist’s books--which he has pursued over the course of five decades. Ruscha created his first word paintings--with oil paint on paper--in Paris in 1961. While words and phrases often function as symbols and motifs in his work, books as objects also make a substantial appearance, and the artist has deployed an astonishing range of visual means to explore the act of reading as a meaning-generating process. The 16 small artist’s books Ruscha produced between 1962 and 1978 (Twentysix Gasoline Stations, Various Small Fires, et al.) remain definitive classics of the genre. The texts written especially for Reading Ed Ruscha by Douglas Coupland and W.S. Di Piero explore Ruscha’s use of text through the lens of literary and poetic form, while Beatrice von Bismarck, in her essay, examines the book as work, medium of publication and exhibition format. The catalogue’s editor, Yilmaz Dziewior, presents an overview of Ruscha’s engagement with artist’s books and the written word. Published to coincide with an exhibition at the Kunsthaus Bregenz in Austria, Reading Ed Ruscha includes large-format illustrations of exhibitions and installation views, with 400 images in color.
PUBLISHER Kunsthaus Bregenz
BOOK FORMAT Hardcover, 9.5 x 12 in. / 256 pgs / 400 color.
PUBLISHING STATUS Pub Date 3/31/2013 Out of print
DISTRIBUTION D.A.P. Exclusive Catalog: SPRING 2013 p. 105
PRODUCT DETAILS ISBN 9783863352325SDNR30 List Price: $100.00 CAD $120.00
Published by Steidl. Contributions by Robert Dean, Lisa Turvey.
Ed Ruscha: Catalogue Raisonné of the Paintings, Volume 5 comprises 195 paintings, reproduced in full color. A highlight is the complete layout of the 1995 Denver Central Library project, which Ruscha described as a rolling historical landscape of Colorado and the West. Other notable series of this period include the Cityscape paintings, which resemble ransom notes, and a group of images of clock faces titled after the names of American cars and car manufacturers. This volume also includes numerous documentary photographs, a selection of Ruscha's sketchbook pages and complete bibliographic references and exhibition histories. It is edited by Robert Dean and Lisa Turney with an essay by Hal Foster, "Evening in America," which analyzes Ruscha's paintings of the 1990s.
Published by Hatje Cantz. Text by Michael Auping, Richard Prince. Interview by Michael Auping.
Since his first road trip in 1956, driving from Oklahoma City to Los Angeles, Ed Ruscha has continued to muse on America as seen from the road: "I like being in the car, and seeing things from that vantage point," he has said. "Sometimes I give myself assignments to go out on the road and explore different ideas. My books are an example of that." Consisting of around 75 works spanning the artist's entire career, Ed Ruscha: Road Tested includes many of the famous aforementioned artist's books, including Twenty-Six Gasoline Stations, Real Estate Opportunities, Some Los Angeles Apartments, Thirty-Four Parking Lots and the groundbreaking artist's book Every Building on the Sunset Strip; some of Ruscha's most iconic paintings, such as the "Standard Stations" and the "Hollywood Signs," as well as paintings inspired by street names and road signs; and his exploration of the topography of greater Los Angeles in paintings that depict aerial grids of the city, as well as various southern California horizons and sunsets. Also examined here is the rarely seen Ruscha film Miracle (1975), which tells the story of a mechanic whose obsessive repair of the carburetor on a 1965 Mustang dooms his date with a beautiful woman. The first-ever treatment of a primary theme in the artist's career, Road Tested at last gives Ed Ruscha his own road show. Ed Ruscha (born 1937) has made pioneering work in the media of painting, printmaking, drawing, bookmaking, photography and film since 1958. Associated in the early 1960s with the Ferus Gallery, Ruscha was included in Walter Hopps' landmark Pop art show New Painting of Common Objects, at the Pasadena Art Museum in 1962. His painting career was recently surveyed in Ed Ruscha: Fifty Years of Painting (D.A.P., 2010).
Published by D.A.P./Distributed Art Publishers. Text by James Ellroy, Ralph Rugoff, Alexandra Schwartz, Bruce Wagner, Ulrich Wilmes. Interview by Kristine McKenna.
Transforming words into icons and images into wide-screen epics, Ed Ruscha has wholly reconceived the terms of painting for our era. Tagged variously as a Conceptualist, Pop artist or latter-day Surrealist, Ruscha flouts category, or rather incorporates all categories, always surprising and experimenting with both subject and method. His paintings are steeped in our times: cinema, advertising, logos, late capitalism and the twists and turns of postwar art have all informed his iconography since the early 1960s, arriving on the cool surfaces of his canvases with magnetic detachment. Ruscha eschews process and focuses exclusively on the final product: “the means to the end has always been secondary in my art,” he has said. Ruscha has also reinvented the use of words in art, finding disquieting ways to invest language with a weird, throbbing, ambient static, never aspiring to what he calls “word gestures,” since “each word is an excursion unto itself.” Fifty Years of Painting focuses on Ruscha's majestic oeuvre of paintings. A magnificent publication, it comes housed in a slipcase that sports the artist's classic painting “Standard Station” (1966), and, alongside fantastic reproductions, it contains a preface by novelist James Ellroy, essays by Ralph Rugoff, Alexandra Schwartz and Ulrich Wilmes, a text by novelist Bruce Wagner, an interview with the artist by Kristine McKenna, an illustrated chronology and an exhibition history. Ed Ruscha (born 1937) has made pioneering work in the media of painting, printmaking, drawing, bookmaking, photography and film since 1958. Associated in the early 1960s with the Ferus Gallery, Ruscha was included in Walter Hopps' landmark Pop art show New Painting of Common Objects, at the Pasadena Art Museum in 1962.
Published by Steidl & Partners. Edited by Robert Dean, Lisa Turvey. Text by Briony Fer, Mel Bochner.
Not every artist is suited to catalogue raisonné treatment, but the oeuvre of Ed Ruscha, comprised as it is of series, repetitions and documentations, looks great under such clerical scrutiny. Projected as a seven-volume edition under the guidance of Robert Dean and Lisa Turvey, the Ruscha Catalogue Raisonné Project lends the serial quality of Ruscha's early artist's books to the entire body of his work, while providing a definitive resource for fans, scholars and collectors in the most efficient style possible. The three previous volumes collected works from 1958-1970, 1971-1982 and 1983-1987. Such esteemed artists and critics as Walter Hopps, Lawrence Weiner, Dave Hickey, Peter Wollen and Yves-Alain Bois have contributed essays celebrating and reviewing Ruscha's steadily incremental accomplishment. Each volume of the catalogue has a stitched binding and a cloth cover with silver-colored embossing, protected with an embossed slipcase. Volume 4 is a co-publication of Gagosian Gallery and Steidl and documents 198 paintings from 1988 to 1992. In addition to almost 200 color reproductions, it includes a comprehensive exhibition history, bibliography and biographical chronology, as well as a text by artist Mel Bochner and an essay by art historian Briony Fer.
Published by Steidl & Partners. Edited by Petrus Schaesberg, Rainer Crone.
Ed Ruscha’s drawings constitute as rich a body of work as his paintings and his books, as the National Gallery of Art’s Cotton Puffs, Q-tips®, Smoke and Mirrors show of 2005 amply demonstrated. Authorized by the artist, Volume 1 of the Edward Ruscha Catalogue Raisonné of Works on Paper (1956–1969) collects approximately 550 sketches, studies and drawings, each presented in chronological order with color reproduction. As a definitive resource, the catalogue provides title, year, medium and dimensions along with location, origin, exhibition history and a bibliography of the works. This first volume collects Ruscha’s earliest works, from his apprenticeship years as an art student, along with sketch ideas, drafts of book covers, studies for oil paintings and drawings of words, often executed in such unusual materials as gunpowder, vegetable juices, petroleum jelly, tobacco stain--and sometimes even in graphite and pastels! All of these works propose Ruscha as a profoundly premeditative artist, for whom sketches are an essential first step on the way to a well-executed final product. They also expose Ruscha as an artist whose finished drawings always invoke their conceptual dimension--particularly so when the materials are unusual, paradoxically--over their texture, thus opening a breach between signifier and the word as icon. As noted critic and art historian Dave Hickey observes, “The mystery of Ed Ruscha’s drawings begins with drawing itself, with its peculiar status in the history of Western art, where it has always occupied an equivocal position between the realms of objects and ideas.”
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BOOK FORMAT Slip Paperback, 9.5 x 11.5 in. / 600 pgs / illustrated throughout.
PUBLISHING STATUS Pub Date 8/31/2009 Cancelled
DISTRIBUTION D.A.P. Exclusive Catalog: FALL 2014
PRODUCT DETAILS ISBN 9783865218322SDNR30 List Price: $210.00 CAD $260.00
Published by The Fabric Workshop and Museum. Preface by Paul Schimmel. Text by Thomas E. Crow.
Ed Ruscha: Industrial Strength is published on the occasion of the artist's completion of "Industrial Strength Sleep," a 23-foot by 9-foot tapestry created at The Fabric Workshop and Museum in Philadelphia and based on his 1989 painting of the same name. In his introductory essay, curator Paul Schimmel explains the artist's process: "Though Ruscha has consistently pushed the boundaries of his own iconography, which typically comprises concrete words and phrases, it is in fact his range of materials and processes that has characterized the ever-changing and restless nature of his practice." The piece--which took three years to complete--was produced at Flanders Tapestries in Wielsbeke, Belgium; Mary Anne Friel, Master Printer at The Fabric Workshop, oversaw production. The publication also includes an essay by art historian and critic Thomas E. Crow.
Over the course of his nearly 40-year career, Ruscha, who was the United States representative at the 51st Venice Biennale in 2005, has consistently used the expansive landscape of Los Angeles--where he has lived and worked since the late 1950s--in his paintings as a backdrop for the often humorous vernacular phrases with which he communicates a particular urban experience.
PUBLISHER The Fabric Workshop and Museum
BOOK FORMAT Hardback, 11.75 x 10 in. / 60 pgs / 36 color.
PUBLISHING STATUS Pub Date 9/1/2008 Out of stock indefinitely
DISTRIBUTION D.A.P. Exclusive Catalog: FALL 2008 p. 84
PRODUCT DETAILS ISBN 9780972455640TRADE List Price: $40.00 CAD $54.00 GBP £35.00
Published by Steidl The Masters. Edited by Robert Dean, Erin Wright. Text by Lawrence Weiner, Dave Hickey, Robert Dean.
Ed Ruscha, one of the most influential artists working today, and one of the great West Coast Pop artists, didn't start out as a painter. It was under the influence of teachers including Robert Irwin, Richards Ruben and Emerson Woelffer that he gave up his original goal of becoming a commercial artist to focus on fine art. This third volume in the ongoing documentation of his entire corpus of paintings captures him in his stride. As throughout the series, each painting, reproduced in color, is given a double-page spread with exhibition and bibliographic history. The artist's sketches for paintings are reproduced in facsimile. This volume contains 165 works, and, of particular note, includes a major public commission for the Philip Johnson-designed Miami-Dade Public Library, which was a turning point for Ruscha. Paintings done immediately prior to this commission can be seen as a summation of the artist's earlier preoccupations and techniques, while those done after the commission show a major shift in direction occasioned by the use of airbrush techniques to produce dark, atmospheric canvases with links to film noir and to such Los Angeles noir writers as Raymond Chandler. With an introductory essay by Robert Dean, a personal tribute by artist Lawrence Weiner, a chronology and a comprehensive bibliography and list of exhibitions.
Ed Ruscha's relationship to photography is complex and ambivalent. The world-class painter--and author of a 1972 New York Times article called "'I'm Not Really a Photographer'"--has been known to refer to his work in this second medium as a "hobby," despite considerable, persistent critical interest. Whether he likes it or not, the small albums of plainly-shot, snapshot-sized images he produced in the 1960s and 70s, including Twenty-Six Gasoline Stations, intrigued his contemporaries and earned him an unshakable reputation. How? His subject matter was neither purely documentary nor solely artistic, in fact it was stereotypical and banal, with motifs drawn from the car-dominated western landscape. That rebellious material, along with his serial presentation, made for a mythical road-movie or photo-novel effect with Beat Generation overtones. The combination attracted artists and critics both, especially while serial logic was prominent in Pop art and Minimalism, and then retained that interest later as serial work became prominent in Conceptual art. Critics have remained attentive for decades, and Ruscha's influence remains apparent in new work in Europe and North America. Ed Ruscha, Photographer departs from earlier collections to explore how these images--and all of Ruscha's work in disciplines including painting, drawing, printmaking and photography--are guided and shaped by a single vision.
Published by Steidl/Gagosian Gallery. Edited by Robert Dean. Essays by Peter Wollen and Reyner Banham.
The Catalogue Raisonné of the Paintings of Ed Ruscha is a six-volume series of books co-published by Steidl and Gagosian Gallery. This is the second volume, which contains entries on 178 paintings completed between 1971 and 1982--from the artist's crisis at the onset of the 70s, when he “quits painting pictures,” to his first major museum retrospective, which opened in March 1982 at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. The catalogue includes a comprehensive exhibition history, bibliography and biographical chronology, as well as a preface by the editor Robert Dean, an essay by UCLA film historian Peter Wollen examining Ruscha's use of color as it relates to his use of language, and an essay by the late Reyner Banham.
Each volume of the catalogue, designed by Bruce Mau, has a stitched binding and a cloth cover with silver-colored embossing protected by an embossed slipcase. Specifications for subsequent volumes are the same.
Published by Hatje Cantz. Essays by Joan Didion, Linda Norden, Frances Stark and Donna De Salvo.
Inspired by the symmetrical, Jeffersonian layout of the American Pavilion's Neoclassical architecture, and by Thomas Cole's cycle of the same name, Ed Ruscha installed this ten-painting exhibition titled Course of Empire at the 2005 Venice Biennale. Five pieces are painted in color and five in black and white. The artist paired each work from his 1992 Blue Collar series with a new color canvas depicting the future of the same urban landscape, some deteriorated, some growing and changing, some seemingly gentrifying. The exhibition will travel in 2006 to The Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. Essays from Linda Norden, the U.S. Commissioner for the Venice Biennale, and artist Frances Stark celebrate the work, while Joan Didion's coolly written but deeply felt piece about her own brokenhearted longing for Los Angeles hits a perfect note.
Between 1963 and 1978, Ed Ruscha produced 18 small artists' books. Usually self-published in small print-runs, these publications have become seminal works in the history of Conceptual art and the photography book. Then & Now is the first artist's book that Ruscha has made since 1978. One of the most famous of Ruscha's books from that early period is Every Building on the Sunset Strip--a famous stretch of real estate along Sunset Boulevard--published in 1966. In July, 1973 he followed the same procedure when he photographed on Hollywood Boulevard. Loading a continuous strip of 30 feet of Ilford FP-4 black & white film into his Nikon F2 and then mounting it on a tripod in the bed of a pickup truck, he drove back and forth across the 12 miles of street shooting both the north and south sides of its entire length. The negatives were developed, contact sheets were made, and the materials placed in storage. 30 years later, in 2003, a digital record of Hollywood Boulevard was created and it served as a reference guide for the traditional film/still documentary of 2004. For this shoot, the same type of camera equipment was used to re-photograph the street on 35mm color-negative film. The resulting material of both shoots--4,500 black & white and 13,000 color images--have been scanned and digitally composed into four panoramics of the complete 12 miles. In Then & Now, the original 1973 northside view is shown along the top of the page and juxtaposed with its 2004 version. The panoramics face each other and they are aligned. The result is what Ruscha refers to as “a piece of history... a very democratic, unemotional look at the world.” Whilst it is a significant historical document which succinctly conflates and renders the passage of time, it is also a project which spans the career of one of the truly original artists of our time and brings his work full circle.
Published by Steidl. Essays by Yve-Alain Bois and Walter Hopps.
Switching to a career in fine art from his dream of becoming a commercial artist, Ed Ruscha first came into prominence in the early 60s with his large word paintings and paintings of commercial icons, such as Twentieth Century Fox and Standard Station, that related in manner and style to the nascent Pop art movement. Drawing on a variety of sources that also included his own drawings, prints and artist's books, Ruscha was often associated with the west coast cool style, but ultimately his work confounded the art world with its sly and elusive sense of deadpan humor, as seen in his series of bird paintings and in the liquid word paintings that rounded out the decade. The Edward Ruscha Catalogue Raisonné of Paintings is a five-volume series under the general editorship of the Gagosian Gallery, and is a co-publication between Gagosian Gallery and Steidl Verlag. Volume One contains 137 paintings printed in full color from Ruscha's student period to the Pop- and Conceptual-inflected word paintings of the 60s. The catalogue includes a comprehensive exhibition history, bibliography and biographical chronology, as well as an appreciation by former Menil Collection director Walter Hopps and an essay exploring Ruscha's pioneering use of language as a subject matter by art historian Yve-Alain Bois of Harvard University. Set in Franklin Book type and printed on acid-free, 170-gram Job Parilux paper, each volume of the catalogue has a stitched binding and a cloth cover with silver-colored embossing protected by an embossed slipcase. Specifications for subsequent volumes are the same. All reproductions were converted to digital form, thanks to which process it has been possible to restore the reproductions of long-lost paintings.
Published by Windsor Press. Essay by Olivier Berggruen. Foreword by Alanah Weston.
The Drawn Word collects Ed Ruscha's work on paper, from his gunpowder drawings of the 60s and 70s through his more recent work from the 90s. Ruscha's treatment of language, of signs and words, has been extremely influential over the last 40 years. His delicate use of a variety of media, from gunpowder to pastel, makes his work on paper some of his most important. In them, he comments on our relationships with certain words, employing their visual impact, sound, and meaning, bringing all of these elements together via humor, among other tools. The work is distinctly American in its references to evocative places, like Hollywood, and in its bold, often monosyllabic style of communication. Appropriately, the design of The Drawn Word evidences a conceptual relationship to the work, incorporating layout grids in reference to Ruscha's interest in commercial design, and phonetic translations of each of Ruscha's words to emphasize the importance of sound in their choosing.
PUBLISHER Windsor Press
BOOK FORMAT Paperback, 11.5 x 11 in. / 96 pgs / 34 color / 2 bw.
PUBLISHING STATUS Pub Date 2/2/2004 Out of print
DISTRIBUTION D.A.P. Exclusive Catalog: SPRING 2004 p. 10
PRODUCT DETAILS ISBN 9780974611600TRADE List Price: $50.00 CAD $60.00
Published by Walther König, Köln. Edited by Philomene Magers. Essays by Thomas Demand, Diedrich Diederichsen.
One of the most consistently inventive artists of recent times, Los Angeles-based Ed Ruscha has been a pioneer in the use of language and imagery drawn from the popular media. From his early powerful word paintings to his influential artist's books of the sixties and seventies to his recent colorful views of generic mountains, Ruscha has investigated the spaces between highways and journeys, images and words, abstraction and representation, public imagery and the contemporary landscape. Ed Ruscha: Gunpowder and Stains presents some of Ruscha's most amazing illustrations from the 1970s--images that feature cryptic slogans, often reminiscent of advertising language, at turns obscured and revealed by the artist's hand. The book also features two important essays: a very personal commentary on Ruscha's impact by Thomas Demand, and an article by Diedrich Diederichsen that offers an in-depth exploration of Ruscha's combination of images and typed letters.
PUBLISHER Walther König, Köln
BOOK FORMAT Hardcover, 10.25 x 8 in. / 72 pgs / 22 color
PUBLISHING STATUS Pub Date 10/2/2000 No longer our product
DISTRIBUTION D.A.P. Exclusive Catalog: SPRING 2001
PRODUCT DETAILS ISBN 9783883754314SDNR30 List Price: $35.00 CAD $40.00
Published by Walker Art Center. Artwork by Ed Ruscha. Edited by Siri Engberg. Text by Clive Philpot.
This slip-cased, two volume publication presents a comprehensive look at the print projects, editions, and artist books of Edward Ruscha.... This monumental book reveals the depths of Ruscha's printmaking process, and offers important insight into the unique aesthetics of a major artist.
Ed Ruscha / Now Then: A Retrospective
Ed Ruscha: Very
Ed Ruscha: Catalogue Raisonné of the Paintings, Volume Seven
Ed Ruscha: Ribbon Words
Ed Ruscha: Books and Paintings
Ed Ruscha: Catalogue Raisonné of the Paintings, Volume Six
Ed Ruscha: Los Angeles Apartments
Ed Ruscha: Reading Ed Ruscha
Ed Ruscha: Catalogue Raisonné of the Paintings, Volume Five
Ed Ruscha: Road Tested
Ed Ruscha: Fifty Years of Painting
Ed Ruscha: Catalogue Raisonné of the Paintings, Volume Four
Ed Ruscha: Industrial Strength
Ed Ruscha: Catalogue Raisonné of the Paintings, Volume Three
Ed Ruscha: Photographer
Ed Ruscha: Catalogue Raisonné of the Paintings, Volume Two
Ed Ruscha: Course of Empire
Ed Ruscha: Then & Now
Ed Ruscha: Catalogue Raisonné of the Paintings, Volume One
Ed Ruscha: The Drawn Word
Ed Ruscha: Gunpowder And Stains
Edward Ruscha: Editions 1962-1999
Parkett No. 55 Ed Ruscha, Andreas Slominski, Sam Taylor-Wood
Ed Ruscha: New Paintings And A Retrospective Of Works On Paper
