CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 6/29/2018

George Condo on Ed Ruscha in 'Very'

Ed Ruscha's 1973 gunpowder drawing, "Year After Year," is reproduced from Very, Hatje Cantz's beautifully produced collection of 50 works on paper from the renowned UBS Art Collection—published to accompany the show currently on view at the Louisiana Museum, Denmark. Hats off to the publishers for their presentation of fellow artist George Condo's sorta wild, highly insightful three-part text on Ruscha, which reads in part: "in his own private laboratory he could develop new formulas to bring the world art they had never experienced before..he used materials unheard of as his alchemical process emerged from gunpowder to grape juice..he found words as strange in combination with other words as his materials were to the standard kit of oil paint .yet the fascinating and ingenious part was all of us knew the words they were not ones you had to look up in the oxford dictionary..they were so obvious that they could be sitting right next to you and you would never have noticed them,,like a brother or sister." Image © Ed Ruscha. Courtesy of the artist and Gagosian.