埃德·魯沙

James Corcoran Gallery, Santa Monica

Kathleen and Irwin Garfield, Los Angeles

Private Collection, London

Waddington Galleries, London

Acquired from the above by the present owner in 2006

New York, Brooke Alexander Gallery, Richard Artschwager / Ed Ruscha, 2004

Fred Fehlau, ‘Ed Ruscha: I Have This Lofty Idea of Landscape Being Pivotal to Making a Picture’, Flash Art, No. 138, January/February 1988, p. 71, illustrated in colour 

Robert Dean and Erin Wright, Edward Ruscha: Catalogue Raisonné of the Paintings, Volume Three: 1983-1987, New York 2007, p. 247, no. P1986.35, illustrated in colour

Colour: The colour in the catalogue illustration is fairly accurate, although the white areas are slightly more blue and the fluorescent yellow of the word 'STOCK' is more vibrant. Condition: This work is in very good condition. Close inspection reveals a few minute spots of rubbing to the top edge towards the top right hand corner. No restoration is apparent when examined under ultra-violet light.
"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. Prospective buyers should also refer to any Important Notices regarding this sale, which are printed in the Sale Catalogue.
NOTWITHSTANDING THIS REPORT OR ANY DISCUSSIONS CONCERNING A LOT, ALL LOTS ARE OFFERED AND SOLD AS IS" IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE CONDITIONS OF BUSINESS PRINTED IN THE SALE CATALOGUE."

Executed in 1986, Ed Ruscha’s Seafood Stock is a spellbinding example of the artist’s infamous City of Lights series. Begun at the end of 1985, this pivotal body of work marks the first major shift in Ruscha’s idiosyncratic style; a move from the soft hazy sunsets that had played a crucial role in his paintings of the previous decade to the mesmerising grid of twinkling lights set against an inky black night sky evidenced in the present work. As in the very best of Ruscha’s works Seafood Stock is inextricably linked to the visual culture of Los Angeles, with its wide, lattice-like boulevards and bright beaming lights. Emblazoned across the sparkling ground are the singular and commanding words, SEAFOOD STOCK, spelled out in Ruscha’s inimitable typeface. The artist settled on his unique typography – a standardised font which he christened Boy Scout Utility – at the beginning of the 1980s for its lack of style and so as not to distract from the meaning of the words depicted. Reflective of the importance of this decisive series, other examples are held in numerous prestigious public and private collections including that of the Broad Art Foundation, Los Angeles; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago.

City of Lights – a title extrapolated from Charlie Chaplin’s 1931 silent romantic movie City Lights – lyrically describes the background of these mesmerising paintings: a city that has been pared back to an essential grid of roads seen at night through the twinkling glow of street lights. This link with cinema is particularly prescient as after the City of Lights series the artist became preoccupied by the language of film and would turn his hand to painting emblems drawn from movies. Ruscha began the City of Lights series after his many journeys flying between Los Angeles and Miami in early 1985 while he was working on a commission for the Miami Dade Library. Indeed, the City of Lights paintings can be understood as vistas of the Los Angeles basin at night, as seen through the slightly refracted window of an aeroplane coming into land. Whilst this captivating corpus of works adheres to the traditional format and size of the paintings the artist executed before his Miami hiatus, the series marks something of a breakthrough in Ruscha’s oeuvre for its innovative use of airbrush. Although Ruscha had already experimented with airbrush in earlier paintings such as Life (1984) and Cables/Fittings (1985) the City of Lights series marks the artist’s first full adoption of the medium that would come to dominate his future practice. In Seafood Stock Ruscha uses the soft, hazy quality of the airbrush to create the dappled pattern of contrasting lights in the background, imbuing the painting with an extraordinary sense of depth and atmosphere.

In a manner akin to the suffused glow of the background, the words that collect in the foreground of Seafood Stock are translucent, evanescent shapes that transfix and intrigue the viewer. The words SEAFOOD STOCK immediately conjure up images of a salty fish stock, which acts as a tantalising visual counterpart to the cityscape over which they hover. Speaking of how he became intrigued by words, Ruscha recalls: “I saw a reproduction in some obscure magazine of Jasper John’s Target with Four Faces and Robert Rauschenberg’s painting with the chicken… And it came to me, oddly enough through the medium of reproduction, and so it was a printed page I was responding to, and not the work itself. But the kind of odd vocabulary they used inspired me – it was like music that you’ve never heard before, so mysterious and sweet, and I just dreamed about it at night” (Ed Ruscha quoted in: Robert Dean and Lisa Turvey, Edward Ruscha: Catalogue Raisonné, Volume Four: 1988-1992, New York 2009, p. 14). Mysterious and endlessly engaging Seafood Stock masterfully combines exquisite and evocative painting with endless possibilities for interpretation.