CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 1/31/2016

Ed Ruscha: Los Angeles Apartments

"The graphite drawings are abstract and realistic at once, spawned, as they are, by the realm of the imagination," Christian Müller writes in Steidl's gorgeous, clothbound Ed Ruscha: Los Angeles Apartments. "They are dematerialized dream images that keep eluding viewers although they are based on photography. Ultimately they are unfathomable, consisting only of light and shadow, existing only on the surface of the paper. Ruscha's Los Angeles Apartments become signs of a residential culture that breeds interchangeability and arbitrariness by flaunting the pretense of individuality and promises it cannot keep. They simply are what they are: façades. 'Los Angeles to me is like a series of storefront planes that are all vertical from the street, and there's almost like nothing behind the façades. It's all façades here—that's what intrigues me about the whole city of Los Angeles—the façade-ness of the whole thing." Featured image is "Thayer Avenue" (1965).