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Ed Ruscha
Documenta 5 (Engberg 66) early 1970s screenprint signed/N for Kassel art show
1972

Name: Documenta 5 (Engberg 66) early 1970s screenprint signed/N for Kassel art show
Brand: Ed Ruscha
Price: 8800 USD
Availability: InStock

About the Item

Ed Ruscha Documenta 5 (Engberg 66), 1972 Color silkscreen on wove paper Pencil signed and numbered from the limited edition of 150 on the front; the artist's copyright ink stamp and copyright on the back 33 1/5 × 23 4/5 inches Unframed Catalogue Raisonne: Engberg. 66 Published by Verlag Documenta, Kassel, Germany, with the artist's copyright inkstamp and printer ED Ed Ed Ruscha's printed name and copyright verso; printed at Styria Studio, New York Pencil signed and numbered from the limited edition of 150 on the front In 1972, Ed Ruscha was commissioned to design this limited edition silkscreen for the prestigious Documenta 5 exhibition curated by Harald Szeemann which takes place every five years in Kassel Germany. This silkscreen is designed as a swarm of ants spelling out the words "Documenta 5". It is characterized by meticulous draftsmanship. where each ant is depicted at its actual size. And if you look closely, Ruscha has given each one a tiny shadow. (Ruscha also designed a binder-format catalogue for Documenta 5 - the full title of which was Befragung der Realität – Bildwelten heute [“Questioning Reality – Pictorial worlds today”. ) As an artist whose career long preoccupation has been the fall and decline of the American Empire, it's not surprising that his work would also focus on insects -- the creatures that appear with the detritus of society, especially discarded foodstuffs. (Separately, the same year as documenta 5, Ed Ruscha also produced a portfolio of insects, where each print depicts a different insect.) About his "Insects" project, Ruscha explained, "This work involved my indulgence into patterns, I guess. These works emerge from a foray that I’ve always had with little humble objects floating in space. In this case, it happened to be insects....I basically feel like my work comes out of abstract art and that this work is really no exception. I keep thinking of a shotgun blast because most of these works appear to be that way. When you put them up on a wall and look at them, they kind of have that randomness that I appreciated, and I think that’s where that came from. Several years prior to Documenta 5, Ruscha had produced his famous 1970 "Chocolate Room" (re-created for his 2023-4 MoMA retrospective in NYC). As Ruscha recalled, just as he was finishing up that installation and exiting the room, he saw a trail of ants on their way in, heading straight toward the chocolate. Two years later, that swarm of insects loomed large in the artist's imagination, inspiring an entire portfolio of prints and creating the theme for an international art exposition as represented in the present limited edition silkscreen. More about Ed Ruscha: There are things that I’m constantly looking at that I feel should be elevated to greater status, almost to philosophical status or to a religious status. That’s why taking things out of context is a useful tool to an artist. It’s the concept of taking something that’s not subject matter and making it subject matter. —Ed Ruscha At the start of his artistic career, Ed Ruscha called himself an “abstract artist ... who deals with subject matter.” Abandoning academic connotations that came to be associated with Abstract Expressionism, he looked instead to tropes of advertising and brought words—as form, symbol, and material—to the forefront of painting. Working in diverse media with humor and wit, he oscillates between sign and substance, locating the sublime in landscapes both natural and artificial. In 1956, Ruscha moved from Oklahoma City to Los Angeles, where he attended the Chouinard Art Institute. During his time in art school, he had been painting in the manner of Franz Kline and Willem de Kooning, and came across a reproduction of Jasper Johns’s Target with Four Faces (1955). Struck by Johns’s use of readymade images as supports for abstraction, Ruscha began to consider how he could employ graphics in order to expose painting’s dual identity as both object and illusion. For his first word painting, E.Ruscha (1959), he intentionally miscalculated the space it would take to write his first initial and surname on the canvas, inserting the last two letters, HA, above and indicating the “error” with an arrow. After graduation, Ruscha began to work for ad agencies, honing his skills in schematic design and considering questions of scale, abstraction, and viewpoint, which became integral to his painting and photography. He produced his first artist’s book, Twentysix Gasoline Stations—a series of deadpan photographs the artist took while driving on Route 66 from Los Angeles to Oklahoma City—in 1963. Ruscha since has gone on to create over a dozen artists’ books, including the 25-foot-long, accordion-folded Every Building on the Sunset Strip (1966) and his version of Kerouac's iconic On the Road (2009). Ruscha also paints trompe-l’oeil bound volumes and alters book spines and interiors with painted words: books in all forms pervade his investigations of language and the distribution of art and information. Ruscha’s paintings of the 1960s explore the noise and the fluidity of language. With works such as OOF (1962–63)—which presents the exclamation in yellow block letters on a blue ground—it is nearly impossible to look at the painting without verbalizing the visual. Since his first exhibition with Gagosian in 1993, Ruscha has had twenty-one solo exhibitions with the gallery, including Custom-Built Intrigue: Drawings 1974–84 (2017), comprising a decade of reverse-stencil drawings of phrases rendered in pastel, dry pigment, and various edible substances, from spinach to carrot juice. The first retrospective of Ruscha’s drawings was held in 2004 at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Ruscha continues to influence contemporary artists worldwide, his formal experimentations and clever use of the American vernacular evolving in form and meaning as technology and internet platforms alter the essence of human communication. Ruscha represented the United States at the 51st Venice Biennale (2005) with Course of Empire, an installation of ten paintings. Inspired by nineteenth century American artist Thomas Cole’s famous painting cycle of the same name, the work alludes to the pitfalls surrounding modernist visions of progress. In 2018 Ruscha’s Course of Empire was presented concurrently with Cole’s at the National Gallery in London. -Courtesy of Gagosian

Creator:

Ed Ruscha (1937, American)

Creation Year:

1972

Dimensions:

Height: 33.2 in (84.33 cm)Width: 23.8 in (60.46 cm)

Medium:

Pencil,Screen

Movement & Style:

Contemporary

Period:

1970-1979