Lot Essay
"Ruscha has played a crucial role in bringing painting into conversation with changes across the larger contemporary landscape. Retooling the mechanisms of our routine perception with a finely-honed sense of secular wonder, his paintings have illuminated the intersection of popular culture ordinariness and grandeur, the mundane and the sublime." - Ralph Rugoff (R. Rugoff, “Heavenly Noises,” in R. Rugoff, Ed Ruscha: Fifty Years of Painting, exh. cat., Hayward Gallery, London, 2010, p. 11).