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Lot Essay
This work will be included in the forthcoming Edward Ruscha Catalogue Raisonné of Paintings
"Words have these abstract shapes, they live in a world of no size. You can make them any size. You can make them any size, and what's the real size? Nobody knows" (E. Ruscha quoted in R. D. Marshall, Ed Ruscha, p. 106).
For the past four decades Ed Ruscha has made words the focus of his work, concentrating on the intersection between the literal and the pictorial. By painting and drawing words in a variety of mediums, he combines two types of signs -the arbitrary verbal and the descriptive visual- to expand our understanding about the nature and limits of communication. Stating, "it is difficult to unravel art from language," he merges the two, resulting in works that are not easily decoded, either as linguistic signifiers or as aesthetic images.
While Ruscha's interest in language affords him a Conceptual bent, the sources of his words, phrases and sentences are culled from the American vernacular, especially from road signs and the radio, which renders the artist a decidedly Pop derivation. In addition, his method of transferring "found words" into the aesthetic realm result in Duchampian overtones that often lends him the label of Neo-Dada, while his scaled up, de-contextualized words juxtaposed against strange backdrops, recall hints of Surrealism. Defying classification, the gifted artist has been recently recognized; following an acclaimed retrospective at the Whitney Museum in 2004 he was chosen to represent the United States at the Venice Biennale in 2005.
Isolated and enlarged in his paintings, even banal words remembered from the road become unrecognizable and force renewed contemplation. Ruscha's art reinforces the strangeness, arbitrariness, unreality and ineffability of language that nonetheless is the cornerstone of civilization and lubricant of daily existence.
Ruscha's inspiration becomes overt in works that use bold typographies set against stylized Californian topographies. These works reflect an interesting figure-ground relationship between the formal language of advertising and a modern take on nineteenth-century landscape painting of the American West. In fact, the horizontal orientation of words, of which Ruscha is acutely aware, reinforces the horizontality of landscape, and become a sort of "landscape of words." As Kerry Brougher notes, "Ruscha's words hover between the flat, transversal surfaces of the graphic artist and the longitudinal, deep-space world of landscape painting." (K. Brougher, Ed Ruscha, exh. cat., Washington, D.C., Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, 2000, p. 161). Ruscha's works insist on their literal sources and role as signifiers but simultaneously assert their aesthetic power; they seem to become part of a new linguistic system.
Hell/Heaven, 1989, derives from a group of works that use the artist's Catholic upbringing as its source, but also refers to how these words, in their commonplace usage, simply describe extreme situations. The dualistic concepts are presented as oppositions on a formal level: inscribed in different fonts, "HELL" is written right side up in the top-center of the canvas, and just below, "HEAVEN" is written upside down. The words are laid over a nocturnal, aerial view of L.A., ablaze with artificial lights. It seems to suggest that the city of angels, the Promised Land of fortune and fame from nineteenth-century pioneers to modern day Hollywood starlets, possesses a seedy underbelly beneath its alluring veneer. Equally hell to some and heaven to others, Ruscha captures the city in terms of biblical extremes in a way that is appropriate to the myth that surrounds it (and that itself generates through the aggrandized good versus evil narratives of Hollywood.) Heightening the sublime overtones, the stylized landscape could equally be read as a nocturnal sky alight with stars. The expanse of darkness against which the lights flicker, can be construed as the age-old battle between the forces of darkness and light. Limiting his palette to opposing black and white and playing on their allusion to light and dark, good and evil and heaven and hell, Ruscha extends the theme of duality in formal terms as well.
Like words, heaven and hell are intangible concepts with no visual counterparts. Yet, by rendering their letters in large scale, Ruscha lends them an iconic presence. They become weighty and object-like, gradually turning into distinct things that have an identity beyond mere their verbal meaning. Impressive in scale and formally elegant, Hell/Heaven is a powerful work that features the signature characteristics of Ruscha's oeuvre.
"Words have these abstract shapes, they live in a world of no size. You can make them any size. You can make them any size, and what's the real size? Nobody knows" (E. Ruscha quoted in R. D. Marshall, Ed Ruscha, p. 106).
For the past four decades Ed Ruscha has made words the focus of his work, concentrating on the intersection between the literal and the pictorial. By painting and drawing words in a variety of mediums, he combines two types of signs -the arbitrary verbal and the descriptive visual- to expand our understanding about the nature and limits of communication. Stating, "it is difficult to unravel art from language," he merges the two, resulting in works that are not easily decoded, either as linguistic signifiers or as aesthetic images.
While Ruscha's interest in language affords him a Conceptual bent, the sources of his words, phrases and sentences are culled from the American vernacular, especially from road signs and the radio, which renders the artist a decidedly Pop derivation. In addition, his method of transferring "found words" into the aesthetic realm result in Duchampian overtones that often lends him the label of Neo-Dada, while his scaled up, de-contextualized words juxtaposed against strange backdrops, recall hints of Surrealism. Defying classification, the gifted artist has been recently recognized; following an acclaimed retrospective at the Whitney Museum in 2004 he was chosen to represent the United States at the Venice Biennale in 2005.
Isolated and enlarged in his paintings, even banal words remembered from the road become unrecognizable and force renewed contemplation. Ruscha's art reinforces the strangeness, arbitrariness, unreality and ineffability of language that nonetheless is the cornerstone of civilization and lubricant of daily existence.
Ruscha's inspiration becomes overt in works that use bold typographies set against stylized Californian topographies. These works reflect an interesting figure-ground relationship between the formal language of advertising and a modern take on nineteenth-century landscape painting of the American West. In fact, the horizontal orientation of words, of which Ruscha is acutely aware, reinforces the horizontality of landscape, and become a sort of "landscape of words." As Kerry Brougher notes, "Ruscha's words hover between the flat, transversal surfaces of the graphic artist and the longitudinal, deep-space world of landscape painting." (K. Brougher, Ed Ruscha, exh. cat., Washington, D.C., Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, 2000, p. 161). Ruscha's works insist on their literal sources and role as signifiers but simultaneously assert their aesthetic power; they seem to become part of a new linguistic system.
Hell/Heaven, 1989, derives from a group of works that use the artist's Catholic upbringing as its source, but also refers to how these words, in their commonplace usage, simply describe extreme situations. The dualistic concepts are presented as oppositions on a formal level: inscribed in different fonts, "HELL" is written right side up in the top-center of the canvas, and just below, "HEAVEN" is written upside down. The words are laid over a nocturnal, aerial view of L.A., ablaze with artificial lights. It seems to suggest that the city of angels, the Promised Land of fortune and fame from nineteenth-century pioneers to modern day Hollywood starlets, possesses a seedy underbelly beneath its alluring veneer. Equally hell to some and heaven to others, Ruscha captures the city in terms of biblical extremes in a way that is appropriate to the myth that surrounds it (and that itself generates through the aggrandized good versus evil narratives of Hollywood.) Heightening the sublime overtones, the stylized landscape could equally be read as a nocturnal sky alight with stars. The expanse of darkness against which the lights flicker, can be construed as the age-old battle between the forces of darkness and light. Limiting his palette to opposing black and white and playing on their allusion to light and dark, good and evil and heaven and hell, Ruscha extends the theme of duality in formal terms as well.
Like words, heaven and hell are intangible concepts with no visual counterparts. Yet, by rendering their letters in large scale, Ruscha lends them an iconic presence. They become weighty and object-like, gradually turning into distinct things that have an identity beyond mere their verbal meaning. Impressive in scale and formally elegant, Hell/Heaven is a powerful work that features the signature characteristics of Ruscha's oeuvre.