Ed Ruscha

Ulrike Kantor Gallery, Los Angeles
Acquired by the present owner from the above

Taipei Fine Arts Museum; Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery, Barnsdall Art Park, Contemporary Southern Californian Art, April - June 1987
Los Angeles, IKON Ltd., Ed Ruscha, October - December 2004

This work is in very good condition overall. The sheet is hinged on the reverse to the backing board in multiple places. There are artist's pinholes intermittently along the edges. The sheet undulates slightly, due to the artist's choice of medium. Upon very close inspection there is a fine, unobtrusive linear abrasion running diagonally from the center toward the upper right, possible due to the artist's working method. Framed under Plexiglas.
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In their elevation of individual words and letters as objects in their own right, Ed Ruscha’s paintings effectively act as an intriguing illustration of semiological tradition. A profound investigation into the possibilities of technique and medium, World is a superb example of Ruscha’s Stain paintings, in which his iconic lexicographical motif is delineated through unconventional materials. Ruscha reinforced the concept of ‘stain,’ with its connotations of abjection and perversion, through his chosen substances, which included bodily fluids on occasion: in the manner of Andy Warhol’s Oxidation paintings, Ruscha’s Stain paintings can arguably be seen as a powerful reaction against traditional painting and conventional art historical narrative. Dating from a highly significant period of the artist’s career when Ruscha was experimenting with a wide variety of unusual media and different grounds, World stands at the pinnacle of the Stains in its highly accomplished composition and format. Using blackberry juice as a means to aesthetic inspiration, Ruscha reverses the traditional arrangement of his works on paper, ensuring that the brilliant white on the paper background gleams luminously through the concentrated color of the blackberry essence, forming the bold, capitalized ‘WORLD’.

Ruscha had begun moving away from the conventions of oil on canvas in 1967 with the creation of his first works using gunpowder as a medium. Intrigued by the possibilities offered by alternative materials, and seeking to transcend the limitations imposed by tradition, Ruscha rapidly moved on to using an astonishing variety of different liquids, even abandoning conventional painting entirely for a short time in the early 1970s. Ruscha recalled this moment in his career: “There was a period when I couldn’t even use paint. I had to paint with unorthodox materials, so I used fruit and vegetable dyes instead of paint. I had to move some way, and the only way to do this was to stain the canvas rather than to put a skin on it….” (the artist, cited in Exh. Cat., Washington, D.C., Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Ed Ruscha, 2000, p. 153). In addition to blackberry juice, Ruscha employed Pepto-Bismol, caviar and even bodily fluids as creative means, forging a body of work that is utterly distinctive within Twentieth Century artistic practice. For his installation at the 35^th Venice Biennale, Ruscha silkscreened chocolate onto 360 sheets of paper which were then placed on the walls, an exhibition choice that indicated the artist’s immense pride and excitement in the discovery of a totally innovative creative language. As well as paper and canvas, Ruscha also experimented with the use of fabrics for a base, using pioneering combinations such as egg yolk on moiré or blueberry extract on rayon crepe. World, created in 1977, reveals Ruscha’s control of his unconventional media by this stage: the edges of the letters are perfectly inscribed whilst the ‘application’ of the blackberry juice is impressively consistent and even. In its extraordinary appropriation of a natural substance for artistic purposes, World magnificently encapsulates Ruscha’s distinctive methodology and technical skill, and can be considered a truly significant work within the Stain series.