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The Fuller Building 41 East 57th Street, Second Floor New York, NY 10022 212-628-1600 • info@benrimon.com • www.davidbenrimon.com © 2019, David Benrimon Fine Art LLC Special thanks to Siri Engberg and Clive Phillpot, the Walker Art Center as their work on the catalog raisonne is heavily cited throughout this catalog, and for providing a broader context to understanding Ruscha’s graphic work.BIOGRAPHY / 6 stations / 8 liquid works / 16 hollywood / 26 mountains / 32 miscellaneous / 4045BIOGRAPHYB orn 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. Upon graduating in 1960, Ruscha attracted notice as part of the Pop art movement as he worked for ad agencies honing his skills in design and layout, which became integral to his oeuvre of painting and photography. Since he began his career as a graphic artist, Ruscha looked to tropes of advertising and brought words to the forefront of his paintings. In speaking about his renowned word art, 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 on the California freeways. Throughout his career, his art became increasingly more abstracted, placing ambiguous phrases on vistas, highways and monochrome backgrounds. Beginning in the 1980s, the artist began using a font he designed himself – Boy Scout Utility Modern – that contrasted attractively against his more painterly backgrounds. The font has an all-caps typeface in which curved letters are squared off, emulating the Hollywood Sign’s jagged edges. 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 no wonder that his work influenced the development of 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. Besides for being the subject of numerous museum retrospectives, Ruscha also represented the United States at the 51st Venice Biennale in 2005 with Course of Empire, an installation of ten of his paintings, propelling him to even greater international distinction. Ed Ruscha lives and works in Los Angeles. APHYEd Ruscha once said, “I don’t have any Seine River like Monet. I just have the U.S. 66 between Oklahoma and Los Angeles.” Having been brought up in Oklahoma, Ruscha drove along Route 66 at the age of 19 to begin his studies in 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. Twentysix Gasoline Stations as an art object rapidly achieved a fair measure of underground success. The book came to the attention of collector Audrey Sabol from Pennsylvania, who had seen the significant Pasadena Art Museum show, and was keen to meet Ruscha. She came to his studio, where she saw the large Amarillo Texas painting, and suggested that the image would work very well as a screenprint. Ruscha was hesitant of the time-consuming and costly process, but Sabol offered to pay for it in return for a portion of the edition. Ruscha went to Art Krebs, a printer in Los Angeles and paid him $40 to produce the screenprints that he had designed. Using his experience in design, Ruscha made multiple dramatic transformations as he translated the original source photograph of the Standard station in Amarillo, Texas to the final image (Fig. 1). He picked up on the vanishing points in the photograph, removed extraneous detail and then flipped the image. Lastly, he created a radical foreshortening to center the composition on a plunging diagonal line. This diagonal device, a fairly common procedure in both fine and commercial art, serves as a particularly useful method to draw the eye towards the focal point, the word STANDARD. 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. In 1969 Ruscha returned to the theme, creating Mocha Standard, Cheese Mold Standard with Olive and Double Standard (Figs. 2-4). He would revisit the Standards a few more times in his graphic work, including Roadmaster and Ghost Station (Figs. 5-6). The Standard stations are undoubtedly one of Ruscha’s most iconic and illustrious subjects and an enduring tribute to the Great American West. STANDARD STATIONSNext >