Staff Picks | Ed Ruscha, Your Space on Building, 2006 — Ed Ruscha's text images are iconic and unmistakable. His typescript arrangements employ text characters as compositional elements as naturally as a vase of flowers in a still life or a window in an interior. But, Ruscha didn't start out making work that resembled his legendary lettered subjects. He began in the mid-late 1950s painting rather unremarkable objects, which presumably existed in his immediate environment--a pack of cigarettes, a pencil, a paintbrush--often rendered floating on a flat ground in a kind of Surrealist manner. Although we begin seeing the word compositions fairly consistently in the early 1960s, his first exhibition at the famed Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles in 1965 was his curiously stunning series of bird paintings. Ruscha has made non-text imagery throughout his career and across all mediums. They serve as equally enigmatic to his quizzical word configurations--a ship, a coyote, a wagon train. For me, his 2006 series of blank signposts and billboards is a comical and ironic output for an artist synonymous with word imagery. As evidenced in Your Space on Building from 2006, no subject calls out more to be emblazoned with text than a towering vacant billboard, and yet he leaves it a complete void! The genius of Ruscha, regardless of the presence or absence of text, is that one is invariably left to their own devices to find meaning. — Temma Nanas, Managing Director — Artwork info: Ed Ruscha, Your Space on Building, 2006, color aquatint with sugar-lift flat bite and hard ground etching, 29 3/4 x 25 inches, signed and numbered — #edruscha #ruscha #yourspace #building #billboard #text #arthistory #context #ironic #iconic #ferusgallery #losangeles #la #ruschala #legendary #legend #1965 #2006 #type #character #surrealist #surreal #career #artist #lesliesacksgallery #lsg #stafffavorites #Staffpicks (at Leslie Sacks Gallery)
