Renowned visual artist Ed Ruscha will appear on Feb. 4, 2025 in conversation with acclaimed interviewer and cultural interlocutor Paul Holdengr盲ber.
At the start of his artistic career, Ed Ruscha called himself an 鈥渁bstract artist ... who deals with subject matter.鈥 Abandoning academic connotations that came to be associated with Abstract Expressionism, he looked instead to tropes of advertising and brought words鈥攁s form, symbol, and material鈥攖o the forefront of painting. Working in diverse media with humor and wit, he oscillates between sign and substance, locating the sublime in landscapes both natural and artificial.
In 1956, Ruscha moved from Oklahoma City to Los Angeles, where he attended the Chouinard Art Institute.聽After graduation, Ruscha began to work for ad agencies, honing his skills in schematic design and considering questions of scale, abstraction, and viewpoint, which became integral to his painting and photography. He produced his first artist鈥檚 book,聽Twenty six Gasoline Stations鈥攁 series of deadpan photographs the artist took while driving on Route 66 from Los Angeles to Oklahoma City鈥攊n 1963. Ruscha since has gone on to create over a dozen artists鈥 books, including the 25-foot-long, accordion-folded聽Every Building on the Sunset Strip聽(1966) and his version of Kerouac's iconic聽On the Road聽(2009). Ruscha also paints trompe-l鈥檕eil bound volumes and alters book spines and interiors with painted words: books in all forms pervade his investigations of language and the distribution of art and information.
Ruscha鈥檚 paintings of the 1960s explore the noise and the fluidity of language. With works such as聽OOF聽(1962鈥63)鈥攚hich presents the exclamation in yellow block letters on a blue ground鈥攊t is nearly impossible to look at the painting without verbalizing the visual. Ruscha continues to influence contemporary artists worldwide, his formal experimentations and clever use of the American vernacular evolving in form and meaning as technology and internet platforms alter the essence of human communication. He聽 represented the United States at the 51st Venice Biennale (2005) with聽Course of Empire, an installation of ten paintings. Inspired by nineteenth century American artist Thomas Cole鈥檚 famous painting cycle of the same name, the work alludes to the pitfalls surrounding modernist visions of progress