CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 6/21/2015

Ed Ruscha

"'Whatever my work was made up of in the beginning,' Ed Ruscha said in 1989, 'is exactly what it is like today.' One can quibble with that 'exactly,' but his art is consistent, and this is true twenty years after this comment, too. Ruscha is still intrigued by 'paradox and absurdity,' and for all the immediacy of his images they usually emit a low or high buzz of 'visual noise,' a little or large glitch in communication that provokes 'a kind of a "Huh?"' in the viewer." So begins Evening in America, Hal Foster's essay in volume 5 of Steidl's extraordinary Catalogue Raisonné of the paintings of Ed Ruscha, father of California Pop. "Cold Beer Beautiful Girls" was painted in 1993.