Ed Ruscha

Leo Castelli Gallery, New York (LC #ER330)
Pentti Kouri, New York
Sotheby's, New York, November 20, 1997, Lot 222
Firouz Vakil, Paris
Galerie Volker Diehl, Berlin
Michael Kohn Gallery, Los Angeles
Paul Kasmin Gallery, New York 
Acquired by the present owner from the above in 2006

Robert Dean and Lisa Turvey, eds., Edward Ruscha: Catalogue Raisonné of the Paintings, Volume Four: 1988-1992, New York, 2009, cat. no. P1988.41, p. 103, illustrated in color

This work is in excellent condition. The overturned edges are covered by black tape, which is lifting slightly at intervals but appears stable. There is evidence of very light wear to a small number of areas located along the extreme overturn edges of the canvas. There is a ½" diagonal scuff located 11 ½ - 11 ¾" up from the bottom and 5 ¼ - 5 ½" in from the right edge. Under ultraviolet light there are no apparent restorations. The canvas is unframed.
In response to your inquiry, we are pleased to provide you with a general report of the condition of the property described above. Since we are not professional conservators or restorers, we urge you to consult with a restorer or conservator of your choice who will be better able to provide a detailed, professional report. Prospective buyers should inspect each lot to satisfy themselves as to condition and must understand that any statement made by Sotheby's is merely a subjective qualified opinion.
NOTWITHSTANDING THIS REPORT OR ANY DISCUSSIONS CONCERNING CONDITION OF A LOT, ALL LOTS ARE OFFERED AND SOLD "AS IS" IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE CONDITIONS OF SALE PRINTED IN THE CATALOGUE.

Reverberating with the electric energy of success, Victory encapsulates the exuberance of Ed Ruscha’s matchless artistic vernacular with stunning clarity and graphic force. Executed in 1988, this is an enigmatic painting that possesses a resounding power and commands a dramatic response. Here, the single initial “V.” is emblazoned in atmospheric grisaille in the center of the perfectly 64-inch square canvas. While Ruscha titled the work with the triumphant Victory, the letter maintains an ambiguity of meaning, raising varied associations in the mind of each viewer. By nature of its punctuation, the letter’s abbreviation suggests more—an inconclusive mystery that Ruscha thrillingly does not spell out. Supremely sophisticated in the bichromatic simplicity of its palette, Victory conveys immediate authority: stamped with a conclusory period, this letter resonates with unparalleled conviction. Moreover, the letter V possesses a compelling minimal elegance—its two diagonal bars evoke the reductive formal language of Frank Stella, Dan Flavin, and Tony Smith. Throughout his remarkable career, Ed Ruscha has maintained an extraordinary conceptual consistency that serves as the foundation for his numerous groundbreaking stylistic explorations. For all the immediacy of his images, there is an ever-present undercurrent of paradox that complicates the seemingly direct relationship between representation and meaning, provoking a moment of pause from the viewer and preventing any straightforward notions of reading, seeing, and comprehending. 

As the atmospheric fog rises from the environs of the single letter V., the picture plane is absorbed in a ghostly ethereal haze where darkness slowly meets an ivory light. Recalling the pervasive influence of film and Hollywood on the artist’s work, the subtly blurred outlines that seep from the letter’s borders into the surrounding monochrome background radiates with the same buzz as a frame of a projected analog film. Writing about the body of paintings to which Victory belongs, Briony Fer explains: “The silhouette paintings that Ruscha began to paint in the mid-eighties dramatize the mechanics of viewing as a mixture of prototypical processes and archetypical images… More shadow plays than silhouettes, their contours are fuzzy and indistinct… The airbrushed technique—originally borrowed from advertising billboards and other commercial forms of illustration—deprives the images not only of brushstrokes, but of any perceivable surface with an identifiable edge. They hover in a kind of fog, in a spatial zone that is impossible to locate with any precision… As Hal Foster has pointed out, screen titles in film appear to hover somewhere not on, but in front of the screen. Light and shadow, which would traditionally have been rendered in painting’s most refined techniques to describe three-dimensional forms on a two-dimensional plane (chiaroscuro and sfumato), now tend to flatten things out. They create a fairly shallow sliver of space, in which shadows seem to play across a screen rather than open onto a fictional space beyond, or behind, the picture.” (Briony Fer in Robert Dean and Lisa Turvey, eds., Edward Ruscha: Catalogue Raisonné of the Paintings, Volume Four: 1988-1992, New York, 2009, p. 7)

Ruscha was prominently included in the first museum exhibition of American Pop Art, the seminal New Painting of Common Objects organized in 1962 by Walter Hopps for the Pasadena Art Museum. The exhibition displayed Ruscha’s 1962 paintings Box Smashed Flat and Actual Size alongside the earliest work by Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, and Wayne Thiebaud, drawing connections for the first time among painters influenced by the imagery of advertising, newspapers, and magazines. Ruscha’s artistic identity was forged while he was a student at the Chouinard Art Institute near downtown Los Angeles, where he began his studies in 1956. Ruscha emerged in a period where the artistic climate was dominated by the hegemonic influence of New York School Abstract Expressionism. For the artist, who initially experimented in modes of gestural abstraction akin to the work of Franz Kline and Willem de Kooning, an epiphany arrived when he first saw a reproduction in Print magazine of Jasper Johns’ Target with Four Faces. At once a seemingly neutral ready-made image and a surrealist interrogation of the flatness of its painterly support, Johns’ early work was a critical influence in Ruscha’s investigation of signs and matter. Perennially interested in the ontological potential of the flat picture plane, Ruscha’s work investigates the inevitable illusion that results when anything is painted upon a two-dimensional surface. With Victory, Ruscha presents a stark flatness that alludes to depth through its chiaroscuro shadows, akin to the frame of a film shuttering on the silver screen. An exhilarating articulation of Ruscha’s iconic artistic language, Victory combines stark literalness with infinite potential for interpretation.