Zander Galerie is pleased to present the exhibition Ed Ruscha, photographs, featuring a selec­tion of works from the 1960s to the 2010s. Ruscha is considered as one of the most influential yet idiosyncratic contemporary artists. His work defies easy categorization as Pop Art or Conceptual Art, hence the writer J.G. Ballard once simply described his position as “the coolest gaze in American art.”

Ed Ruscha’s imagery is rooted in the West Coast lifestyle and topography of the 1950s and 1960s: the phenomena of mass culture and the myths of Hollywood and the open road. Inspired by Walker Evans and Robert Frank, Ruscha started to take seemingly casual photographs of gas stations as he drove along Route 66 between his hometown Oklahoma City and his new life in Los Angeles. Ruscha self-published the now legendary series in his first artist’s book with the dead­pan title Twentysix gasoline stations, 1962. In the subsequent photographic works through 1970, which are on view in the exhibition, Ruscha chose as subjects for his black-and-white photo­­graphs a series of Los Angeles apartments, Vacant lots, thirty Parking lots, and, in colour, nine Swimming pools. While the mundane architecture is devoid of any striking in­dividual attributes, to­gether they define the characteristic cityscape of Los Angeles. The use of serial re­presentation of stereotypical motifs became prevalent in Pop Art, Minimalism, and Conceptual Art, and had a lasting influence on later generations of artists.

In 1961, shortly before Andy Warhol debuted Campbell’s Soup cans, Ed Ruscha was already photo­graphing product packaging against a white studio backdrop that made the images look like still lifes. With an ironic undertone, Ruscha’s work Products pays homage to the aesthetics of household goods with familiar brand logos as icons of Californian consumer culture: from Sun Maid raisins to washing powder and car wax: “There are things that I’m constantly looking at that I feel should be elevated to greater status, almost to philosophical status or to a religious status.” Many of the motifs from Ed Ruscha’s photographic works also find their way into his paintings, drawings and prints.

Rucha’s innovative use of graphic text elements seems at odds with the painterly backgrounds of his images. The contrast creates formal-aesthetic tension, reflecting the fact that larger-than-life billboards have become part of the American landscape. In a featured set of photo­gravures with screenprints, titled Country Cityscapes, 2001, it is the ominous absence of text, defined by broken blank strips, that commands the foreground. The redaction marks in black or white are set against and partly obscure majestic mountain views. The effect of depth in the nature panorama is radically blocked and so the viewer is denied a nostalgic gaze into the dis­tan­ce. Individual captions under each of the six images exactly correspond to the marks in length and read like ransom notes from a Western film: Do as told or suffer. Ruscha has con­tinued to explore the iconic entanglement of the American landscape with the entertainment industry and advertising world in his work across genres. The most recent work in the exhibition, a photo­graphic seascape from 2012 bordered by a colour drawing, is laconically called Advertisement.

Ed Ruscha (b. 1937 in Oklahoma City) moved to Los Angeles in 1956 to study at the Chouinard Art Institute with the original intention of becoming a commercial artist. His work includes paintings, drawings, prints, photographs, artist’s books and films and is included in the collections of major international museums. In addition to numerous solo and group exhibitions, Ruscha represented the United States at the 51st Biennale di Venezia in 2005.