Ed Ruscha “Six Decades of Printmaking”

David Benrimon Fine Art

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David Benrimon Fine Art presents Ed Ruscha: Six Decades of Printmaking, an exhibition focused on the revolutionary works Ruscha began creating in the early 1960s. The exhibition will be held in David Benrimon Fine Art’s new location in the iconic Fuller Building in Manhattan.

Born in 1937 in Omaha, Nebraska, Ed Ruscha grew up in Oklahoma City before moving to Los Angeles in 1956 to study art at the Chouinard Institute (now known as CALARTS). Upon graduating, Ruscha attracted notice as part of the Pop art movement but with a sensibility altogether his own. Through his work for ad agencies, Ruscha honed his skills in design and layout, which became integral to his oeuvre across all media. Ruscha looked to tropes of advertising and brought words to the forefront of his paintings. In speaking about his renowned use of words, Ruscha said, “I like the idea of a word becoming a picture, almost leaving its body, then coming back and becoming a word again.”

Ruscha began his famous series of word paintings in the 1960s, depicting various views of the Hollywood sign, logos of movie studios and roadside views of gas stations. He once said, “I don’t have any Seine River like Monet. I just have the U.S. 66 between Oklahoma and Los Angeles.” In his early 20s, he made numerous trips home along Route 66, passing the countless filling stations that punctuated the route’s entire length and photographing them along his drives. The Standard Station edition was met with immediate acclaim, singled out by Life magazine as one of the most noteworthy prints of the 60’s graphics boom. They are undoubtedly his most iconic subjects and an enduring tribute to the Great American West.

Throughout the rest of his career, his work became increasingly more abstracted, placing ambiguous phrases on vistas, highways and monochrome backgrounds. Recognized for creative paintings and drawings with unusual materials such as gunpowder, blood and Pepto Bismol, Ruscha continues to underscore the deterioration of language. It is of no wonder that his work has so greatly influenced Conceptual art in the United States. His work includes paintings, drawings, prints, photographs, artist’s books and films, and is in the collections of major national and international museums. Beyond his numerous museum retrospectives, Ruscha also represented the United States at the 35th and 51st Venice Biennale with Chocolate Room in 1970 and Course of Empire in 2005, propelling him to even greater international recognition. Ed Ruscha lives and works in Los Angeles and it is David Benrimon Fine Art’s privilege to curate an all-encompassing showcase of his highly impressive career as a printmaker.