Ed Ruscha / Now Then: A Retrospective - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 163345150X ISBN 13: 9781633451506

Publisher: The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2023

Synopsis

Published to accompany the most comprehensive presentation of Ed Ruscha’s work to date, this catalogue spans 65 years of the artist’s remarkable career and mirrors his own cross-disciplinary approach

About this title

About the Author

Christophe Cherix is The Robert Lehman Foundation Chief Curator of Drawings and Prints at The Museum of Modern Art, New York.

From the Back Cover

A sweeping cross-media survey of Ruscha’s six-decade career, from paintings and works on paper to photographs and artist's books, with essays by leading scholars.

Spanning 65 years of Ed Ruscha’s remarkable career and mirroring his own cross-disciplinary approach, Ed Ruscha / Now Then features over 250 objects, produced from 1958 to the present, including paintings, drawings, prints, films, photographs, artist’s books and installations. Published to accompany the most comprehensive presentation of the artist’s work to date, and his first solo exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, this richly illustrated catalog highlights Ruscha’s most acclaimed works alongside lesser-known aspects of his practice.
Essays by an interdisciplinary group of contributors examine Ruscha’s work under a new light, beyond the categories of Pop and Conceptual art with which he has traditionally been associated, to present fresh perspectives on one of the most influential figures in postwar American art. Taken together, they underscore Ruscha’s singular contributions, including his material exploration of language, experiments with unconventional mediums―such as gunpowder, chocolate or chewing tobacco―and his groundbreaking self-published books. Supplemented by an illustrated chronology and exhibition history, this publication captures the ceaseless reinvention that has defined his prolific, six-decade career.
Ed Ruscha (born 1937) was raised in Oklahoma City and moved to Los Angeles in 1956, where he attended the Chouinard Art Institute (now CalArts). First showing with the Ferus Gallery in the early 1960s, Ruscha was included in Walter Hopps' landmark Pop art show New Painting of Common Objects at the Pasadena Art Museum in 1962. He has since shown his work extensively, most recently in several medium-specific museum surveys, including the 2004 exhibition Cotton Puffs, Q-Tips®, Smoke and Mirrors: The Drawings of Ed Ruscha at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, which traveled to the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, and the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, and the 2009 exhibition Ed Ruscha: Fifty Years of Painting at the Hayward Gallery, London, which traveled to the Haus der Kunst, Munich, and Moderna Museet, Stockholm. In 2005, he represented the United States at the 51st Venice Biennale. Ruscha lives and works in Los Angeles.

Edition details

• Publisher: The Museum of Modern Art, New York
• Publication date: 2023
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 163345150X
• ISBN 13: 9781633451506
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 320
• Editor: Cherix Christophe, Torok Ana, Aebi Kiko