Ed Ruscha
Stranger
1983

Name: Stranger
Brand: Ed Ruscha
Rating: 5 (4 reviews)

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About the Item

TECHNICAL INFORMATION: Ed Ruscha Stranger 1983 Lithograph 30 x 22 1/2 in. Bon A Tirer (B.A.T.) from an edition of 7 Pencil signed and annotated B.A.T. Accompanied with COA by Gregg Shienbaum Fine Art. Condition: This work is in excellent condition. Frame: This work is floated in a wood frame, that perfectly shows the corners and the margins of the paper. ABOUT THE WORK: This work was done in 1983, from an edition of only 7 pieces. It is extremely limited, and extremely rare. This particular work is the B.A.T. (Bon A Tirer). That means "right to pull" The B.A.T. is the 1st print pulled from the edition and marked as such, allowing the printers to know that the rest of the edition is ready to be printed and completed Again it is extremely rare. Ruscha offers the capacity for multiple meanings of words, as seen in Stranger. Stranger can be a understood as a comparison of more or less than, or rather something or someone unknown. There is no definitive right answer, the meaning is based upon viewer discretion. The descending style in which he displays the word, both iconic and playful, elicits a similar ambiguity. ABOUT THIS ARTIST: Edward Ruscha has remained an important figure in American art since the early 1960's when his artwork first came to the fore as part of the West Coast Pop Art movement. Since that time, he has continued to develop his signature style, which combines words and images on the same visual field. By doing so, visual and verbal means of communication coexist and create a sense of friction. The words conjure mental images that do not necessarily describe what the eye actually sees in the painting. A painter, printmaker, and filmmaker, Edward Ruscha was born in Omaha, Nebraska, in 1937, and lived some 15 years in Oklahoma City before moving permanently to Los Angeles where he studied at the Chouinard Art Institute from 1956 through 1960. By the early sixties he was well known for his paintings, collages, and printmaking, and for his association with the Ferus Gallery group, which also included artists Robert Irwin, Edward Moses, Ken Price, and Edward Kienholz. He later achieved recognition for his paintings incorporating words and phrases and for his many photographic books, all influenced by the deadpan irreverence of the Pop Art movement.   Ruscha has a talent for making the banal seem significant. He often reduces his subject to the minimum amount of detail needed for identification. Places and structures are often depicted as shadows. Ruscha is interested in language, and how that language can describe but not depict space. Words have been present in many of Ruscha's paintings, often occupying the whole canvas. What they say is always clear. but what they mean is more ambiguous. A major retrospective of Ruscha’s career opened at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C. in June 2000 and traveled to the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, The Miami Art Museum, and the Modern Art Museum of Ft. Worth, TX. In 2001 Ruscha was elected to The American Academy of Arts and Letters as a member of the Department of Art. Ruscha's work has been exhibited internationally for three decades and is represented in major museum collections. Among his other public commissions are a mural commissioned for the Miami-Dade Public Library, Miami, Florida (1985 and 1989); and for the Great Hall of the Denver Central Library, Colorado (1994-95). Ruscha is represented in Los Angeles by Gagosian Gallery and in New York by Leo Castelli Gallery. In 2004, The Whitney Museum of American Art exhibited an Ed Ruscha drawing retrospective, Cotton Puffs, Q-tips®, Smoke and Mirrors: The Drawings of Ed Ruscha. At the invitation of the U.S Department of State, four distinguished American museums recommended noted American artist Ed Ruscha to represent the United States at the 2005 Venice Biennale. The group consisted of the directors and curatorial representatives of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden of the Smithsonian Institution, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art. Mr. Ruscha nominated Linda Norden, the Associate Curator of Contemporary Art at the Fogg Art Museum of Harvard University, to serve as curator of his exhibition. The U.S. Department of State approved these recommendations.

Creator:
Ed Ruscha (1937, American)
Creation Year:
1983
Dimensions:
Height: 35 in (88.9 cm)Width: 24.5 in (62.23 cm)Depth: 2 in (5.08 cm)
More Editions & Sizes:
Bon a Tirer Edition of 7Price: $51,300
Medium:
Lithograph
Movement & Style:
Contemporary
Period:
1980-1989
Condition:
This work is in excellent condition.
Gallery Location:
Miami, FL
Reference Number:
1stDibs: LU53831683473

Shop All Ed Ruscha

Ed Ruscha

Indisputably one of the most iconic American artists of the 20th century, Ed Ruscha has built a formidable body of work by staking a claim on the deceptively simple intersection of text and image, superimposing elliptical phrases (or, often, single words) over West Coast landscapes to create prints and paintings that can be read instantaneously yet evade easy understanding.

Alongside artists like Robert Irwin and Billy Al Bengston, Ruscha was a pioneer of the 1960s Los Angeles art scene as part of the famed Ferus Gallery. His embrace of Hollywood vernacular and the open Western road have tied him as closely to the identity of L.A. art as Jackson Pollock is to that of New York.

Coming to California in 1956 at the age of 18, Ruscha intended to become a commercial painter but found himself drawn to fine art, over time being shaped by three galvanizing influences: Marcel Duchamp, Pop art and the movies.

Meeting Duchamp when the Pasadena Art Museum (now the Norton Simon Museum) hosted the French Conceptual artist's first U.S. show, Ruscha was especially affected by his use of "readymade" objects and imagery, rendered unfamiliar through unexpected titles or text. Andy Warhol's Campbell's Soup can paintings, meanwhile, were shown for the first time at the Ferus Gallery in 1962, opening up new vistas for Ruscha. Movies, then, provided another inspiration through their use of title cards, placing graphic text over filmic shots — The End, for instance — for maximum impact.

Ruscha began his famous series of word paintings in the 1960s, depicting various views of the Hollywood sign and the logos of studios like 20th Century Fox, but also roadside views like the Standard Oil stations dotting L.A.'s freeways. Over time these became more abstracted, pinning ambiguous, free-floating phrases (Wall Rockets is a famous example) to natural vistas, scenes of highways, or monochrome backgrounds. Beginning in about 1980, the artist began using a sharp font he designed himself, called Boy Scout Utility Modern.

A master printmaker who also works across the mediums of books, drawing, photography and even film — in 2009 he starred in a movie directed by the artist Doug Aitken — Ruscha has been an influence on a staggering array of artists, including Stephen Shore, Christopher Wool and Anselm Kiefer.