The American flag billows against an extraordinarily vermilion sky in Georges’ Flag from 1999, an operatic ode to Ed Ruscha’s career-long commitment to Pop, conceptualism, and his distinctly West Coast sensibility. A vast and epic painting of histrionic significance, Georges’ Flag deploys the intellectually loaded image of the national banner so aptly appropriated in the most seminal works by Ruscha’s peers – from Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, to Claes Oldenburg – and now stands as a testament to the artist’s longstanding interest in the American West. In the 1960s, Ruscha first powerfully asserted that language itself was representation – that text could be legible as both word and object – thus pushing the boundaries of the then-nascent Pop movement. In 1985, however, his investigation of words’ dual truth as both text and image turned its attention into the semiotic realm of signs and signals with his first flag paintings. Georges’ Flag marks the last canvas in an early group of six paintings centering the American flag executed between 1985-99, a motif so resonant and resounding that Ruscha would later reengage it in 2017 and feature it prominently in his solo exhibition at the Vienna Secession, Ed Ruscha: Double Americanisms. Georges’ Flag thunders at panoramic scale, an absorptive, arresting vista which commands its viewer’s salutations and meditations on a country’s iconography.
Georges’ Flag by Ed Ruscha will be sold at the Now and Contemporary Auction, presented in partnership in Samsung, on 20 November in New York.
