Ed Ruscha
03 September - 23 October 2010
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Ed Ruscha
Apartments, Parking Lots, Palm Trees and Others:
Films, Photographs and Drawings from 1961 to 1975
Monika Sprüth and Philomene Magers are pleased to present an exhibition
of work by Ed Ruscha in Berlin, featuring early photographs, drawings as
well as two filmic works.
Since the early 1960s, Ed Ruscha has created an extensive painterly,
graphical, and photographic oeuvre. Ruscha first considered working as a
graphic artist but soon developed a deep passion for painting and
photography. Inspired by the American photography of the 1940s and
1950s, Ruscha developed an independent conceptual approach which is
manifested in the sixteen photo-books, created between 1963 and 1978, in
which he offered a fresh interpretation of the idea of the artist's
book. These small, unpretentious books, which Ruscha always issued in a
limited edition, anticipated with their titles in a laconic manner the
entire contents of the books, for example Twentysix Gasoline Stations
(1963); Various Small Fires and Milk (1964); Some Los Angeles Apartments
(1965); Every Building on the Sunset Strip (1966) as well as Thirtyfour
Parking Lots in Los Angeles (1967) or Nine Swimmingpools and a Broken
Glass (1968). They show how Ruscha broke away from the traditions of the
genre and simultaneously distanced himself from the subjectivist,
analytical photo-books of such author-photographers as Robert Frank and
Walker Evans. Coming to the fore here, instead of pictorial sequences
ordered according to formal and contentual critiera, was a serial
arrangement in which the disregard of classical conventions of
photography, namely the requirements of perspective and composition,
became a characteristic of his photographic aesthetic. Ruscha's pictures
map out the redundant appearance of the West Coast civilization of the
USA through the monotony and repetitiveness of the series.
Although Ed Ruscha considers himself to be a painter and draftsman
rather than a photographer, in 1999 he issued thirty motifs from his
artist book Thirtyfour Parking Lots (1967/1999). His procedure of
selection for the re-edited photographs was intuitive. He described it
in this way: ‘Originally, I thought that the pictures were a means to an
end, a vehicle to make a book. And then along the way there was some
gear shifting. Over the years, I began to appreciate print quality and
see my photographs as not necessarily reproductions for a book, but as
having their own life as silver gelatin prints.‘(*) The exhibition
presents works which are characteristic of Ruscha's photographic oeuvre,
and which arose in the context of the artist-books but are not
necessarily a part of them. For example, the black silhouette of the
palm tree, which originally adorned the main motif of the artist-book
entitled A Few Palm Trees (1971), was later featured as an autonomous
photograph in the series Palm Trees (1971/2003). Furthermore, Ruscha
combined a selection of ‘outtakes‘ into the portfolio Real Estate
Opportunities (1970/2003), which brings together photographs of
unattractive building sites with subtle irony.
Equally characteristic for Ruscha's aesthetic are the pictures of
unfrequented sections of streets in the Roof Top Views (1961/2003),
which suggest an arbitrary selection of images. Works such as the
completely deserted views of the stereotypical architecture of Apartment
Houses (1965/2003) convey, through both a formal and technical
nonchalance as well as through their distanced perspective, a sharp
break with the viewing habits of the time.
The apartment buildings, which are typical of Los Angeles and are
photographed from an extremely slanted angle, are also reminiscent of
the experimental perspective of the Russian Formalists. With these
photographs, Ruscha clarified his point of view with regard to
photography: ‘Drawings would never express the idea - I like facts,
facts, facts are in these books. The closest representation to an
apartment house in Some Los Angeles Apartments is a photograph, nothing
else, not a drawing, because that becomes somebody else’s vision of what
it is, and this is the camera’s eye, the closest delineation of that
subject.’(**) But he contradicted this particular statement by creating
in the same year several graphite drawings on the basis of these
photographs, precisely because a personal interpretation of this theme
was interesting for him. Here the studies, reduced to their semiotic
character and based on concrete geographical models, such as Study for
Doheny Drive Apartment Building (1965) and Study for St. Tropez
Apartment Building (1965), make it clear how much Ruscha uses both media
in his oeuvre, and the manner in which they exercise a mutual influence
on each other.
The interpenetration of the various genres becomes especially apparent
in his only film works Premium (1971) and Miracle (1975). Proceeding
from a short story by Mason Willians entitled How to Derive the Maximum
Enjoyment from Crackers (1964), Ruscha arranged in Premium a scenario
which he first projected in his photo-book Crackers from 1969 and
subsequently transformed into a film. Miracle contains the essence of
the artist's same-named painting, inasmuch as the story is told of a
strange day in the life of an auto mechanic.
Ed Ruscha was born in 1937 in Omaha, Nebraska; he lives and works in Los
Angeles. In 2005 Ruscha represented the United States of America at the
51st Venice Biennale; in September 2006, Ruscha was awarded the
cultural prize of the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Photographie (DGPh,
‘German Society for Photography’).
Important solo exhibitions have included Cotton Puffs, Q-tips®, Smoke
and Mirrors: The Drawings of Ed Ruscha at the Museum of Contemporary Art
in Los Angeles in 2004, which was subsequently exhibited at the
National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. Furthermore, during the same
year the Whitney Museum initiated the exhibition Ed Ruscha and
Photography. Likewise in 2004, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney
presented an exhibition with a selection of Ruscha's photographs as well
as paintings, drawings, and artist-books, which was subseqently shown
at the Museo Nazionale delle Arti del XXI Secolo in Rome, as well as at
the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art in Edinburgh. A further
exhibition of Ruscha's photographs entitled Ed Ruscha and Photography
was mounted in 2006 by the Jeu de Paume in Paris, the Kunsthaus Zürich
and the Museum Ludwig in Cologne. In 2009 the Hayward Gallery in London
organized what is certainly the most comprehensive retrospective of
Ruscha's paintings up to now with the exhibition Fifty Years of
Painting, which after the Haus der Kunst in Munich may currently be seen
until the beginning of September at its final station, the Moderna
Museet in Stockholm.
Sprüth Magers Berlin will also be concurrently presenting exhibitions by Barbara Kruger and Astrid Klein.
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