Edward Ruscha comprised over seventy paintings by the internationally recognized artist, focusing on works made in the past decade. A selection of paintings from the late 1950s through the 1970s—before Ruscha’s definitive rise to national prominence—provided conceptual context to the artist’s more enigmatic, recent work.
The bulk of Edward Ruscha consisted of the artist’s silhouette paintings, a preoccupation of the artist from the mid-1980s on. These grayscale images cultivate a grim, film-noir aesthetic from their often-mundane subjects, with white rectangles imposed around the silhouetted objects like censored labels. The significance of these rectangles, and the paintings’ general lack of text, is clarified by the comparison to Ruscha’s earlier works in the show, which consistently examine the gap between images and language by incorporating and aestheticizing text itself.
Edward Ruscha was organized by Bernard Blistene at the Musée National d'Art Moderne, Centre George Pompidou, and Elbrig de Groot and Karel Schampers at the Museum Boymans-van Beuningen, Rotterdam. The show traveled from these institutions to the Centre Cultural de la Fundacio Caixa de Pensions, Barcelona, the Serpentine Gallery, London, and MOCA.
Edward Ruscha was organized by Kerry Brougher, Curator, The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.