Ed Ruscha

"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.

FORTHCOMING & NEW RELEASES

ED RUSCHA: READING ED RUSCHA
KUNSTHAUS BREGENZ
ISBN: 9783863352325 | US $100.00
Pub Date: 3/31/2013
Active | Awaiting stock

ACTIVE BACKLIST

ED RUSCHA: ROAD TESTED
Text by Michael Auping, Richard Prince. Interview by Michael Auping.
HATJE CANTZ
ISBN: 9783775728102 | US $40.00
Pub Date: 4/30/2011
Active | In stock

ED RUSCHA: FIFTY YEARS OF PAINTING
D.A.P./DISTRIBUTED ART PUBLISHERS
ISBN: 9781935202066 | US $65.00
Pub Date: 2/28/2010
Active | In stock

ED RUSCHA: INDUSTRIAL STRENGTH
Preface by Paul Schimmel. Text by Thomas E. Crow.
THE FABRIC WORKSHOP AND MUSEUM
ISBN: 9780972455640 | US $40.00
Pub Date: 9/1/2008
Active | In stock

ED RUSCHA: MOUNTAINS/PORTRAITS
Artwork by Ed Ruscha.
ANTHONY D'OFFAY
ISBN: 9781564660824 | US $19.95
Pub Date: 10/2/2000
Active | In stock

PARKETT NO. 55 ED RUSCHA, ANDREAS SLOMINSKI, SAM TAYLOR-WOOD
Artwork by Ed Ruscha. Photographs by Sam Taylor-Wood. Contributions by Andreas Slominski.
PARKETT
ISBN: 9783907582053 | US $32.00
Pub Date: 6/2/1999
Active | In stock

ED RUSCHA: NEW PAINTINGS AND A RETROSPECTIVE OF WORKS ON PAPER
Artwork by Ed Ruscha. Text by Dave Hickey, Neville Wakefield.
ANTHONY D'OFFAY
ISBN: 9780947564742 | US $30.00
Pub Date: 8/2/1998
Active | Awaiting stock

OUT OF PRINT LISTING

ED RUSCHA: COURSE OF EMPIRE
Essays by Joan Didion, Linda Norden, Frances Stark and Donna De Salvo.
HATJE CANTZ PUBLISHERS
ISBN: 9783775716543 | US $19.95
Pub Date: 9/15/2005
Out of print | Not available

ED RUSCHA: THE DRAWN WORD
Essay by Olivier Berggruen. Foreword by Alanah Weston.
WINDSOR PRESS
ISBN: 9780974611600 | US $50.00
Pub Date: 2/2/2004
Out of Print | Not available

ED RUSCHA: GUNPOWDER AND STAINS
Edited by Philomene Magers. Essays by Thomas Demand, Diedrich Diederichsen.
WALTHER KöNIG, KöLN
ISBN: 9783883754314 | US $35.00
Pub Date: 10/2/2000
Out of print | Not available

EDWARD RUSCHA: EDITIONS 1962-1999
Artwork by Ed Ruscha. Edited by Siri Engberg. Text by Clive Philpot.
WALKER ART CENTER
ISBN: 9780935640601 | US $85.00
Pub Date: 6/2/1999
Out of print | Not available

PARKETT NO. 18 ED RUSCHA
Artwork by Ed Ruscha.
PARKETT
ISBN: 9783907509685 | US $19.50
Pub Date: 12/2/1988
Out of print | Not available

FROM THE BLOG

Street Talk with Ed Ruscha
An Interview with Michael Auping

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

Ed Ruscha

"Honey....I Twisted Through More Damn Traffic to Get Here," 1984, is included in Ed Ruscha: Fifty Years of Painting.

Ed Ruscha: Reading Ed Ruscha

Edited by Yilmaz Dziewior. Text by Beatrice von Bismarck, Douglas Coupland, Yilmaz Dziewior, W. S. Di Piero.
Published by Kunsthaus Bregenz

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.

Ed Ruscha: Road Tested

Text by Michael Auping, Richard Prince. Interview by Michael Auping.
Published by Hatje Cantz

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).

Ed Ruscha: Fifty Years of Painting

Text by James Ellroy, Ralph Rugoff, Alexandra Schwartz, Bruce Wagner, Ulrich Wilmes. Interview by Kristine McKenna.
Published by D.A.P./Distributed Art Publishers

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.

Ed Ruscha: Industrial Strength

Preface by Paul Schimmel. Text by Thomas E. Crow.
Published by The Fabric Workshop and Museum

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.

Ed Ruscha: Course of Empire

Essays by Joan Didion, Linda Norden, Frances Stark and Donna De Salvo.
Published by Hatje Cantz Publishers

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.

Ed Ruscha: The Drawn Word

Essay by Olivier Berggruen. Foreword by Alanah Weston.
Published by Windsor Press

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.

Ed Ruscha: Gunpowder And Stains

Edited by Philomene Magers. Essays by Thomas Demand, Diedrich Diederichsen.
Published by Walther König, Köln

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.

Ed Ruscha: Mountains/Portraits

A Postcard Book

Artwork by Ed Ruscha.
Published by Anthony d'Offay

Parkett No. 55 Ed Ruscha, Andreas Slominski, Sam Taylor-Wood

Artwork by Ed Ruscha. Photographs by Sam Taylor-Wood. Contributions by Andreas Slominski.
Published by Parkett

Ed Ruscha: New Paintings And A Retrospective Of Works On Paper

Artwork by Ed Ruscha. Text by Dave Hickey, Neville Wakefield.
Published by Anthony d'Offay

Edward Ruscha: Editions 1962-1999

Artwork by Ed Ruscha. Edited by Siri Engberg. Text by Clive Philpot.
Published by Walker Art Center

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.

Parkett No. 18 Ed Ruscha

Artwork by Ed Ruscha.
Published by Parkett