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Lot Essay
This work will be included in the forthcoming Edward Ruscha Catalogue Raisonné of Paintings, edited by Robert Dean and Erin Wright, volume 6, under no. P1998.02.
'I'm a prisoner of the idea of the landscape in painting and it's something I've continued to be tied to' (Ruscha quoted in R. D. Marshall, Ed Ruscha, London 2003, p. 180). Ed Ruscha has consistently formed an association between written words and landscapes and with the genre of landscape painting in general. This intrinsic connection between sign and landscape in Ruscha's art is revisited in a very literal sense in The Mountain, the second work produced for his series of mountain paintings. Executed in 1998, this ice-cool painting is consistent with Ruscha's most iconic works; a reductive yet playful synthesis of the text and its backdrop. While the backgrounds of many of Ruscha's paintings are often entirely arbitrary, The Mountain works in much the same way as Magritte's famous painting of a pipe, happily playing with the paradoxes between text and image by questioning their reliance on one another. Here, visual and verbal means of communication coexist and create a sense of friction. The word 'the' is a defining article, a noun marker that carries no descriptive qualities in itself, but serves to announce the object behind it. Yet, by raising the letter 'T' to mimic the mountain's verticality, Ruscha simultaneously uses the typography as imagery, thereby establishing its independence as a suggestive symbol or sign.
Ed Ruscha appears to have departed from his West Coast surroundings and source imagery when he began to appropriate imagery of the Himalayan Mountains in his work of the late 1990s, and yet they came to him, he explains, as 'a logical extension of the landscapes that I had been painting for a while - horizontal landscapes, flatlands, the landscape I grew up in' (Ruscha quoted in R. D. Marshall, Ed Ruscha, London 2003, p. 241). For The Mountain, he has chosen to depict the snow-capped summit of Mount Everest. As probably the most widely recognised peak in the world, the 'paint-by-numbers' style image represents the atypical idea of a mountain rather than a celebration of a unique aspect of nature, thereby becoming as generic as the word he has painted over it. In this way, Ruscha does not assert a sentimental stance to the landscape, even though mountain imagery typically serves as shorthand for the sublime. Instead, he subliminally references the west coast dreamland in which he lives by likening the pairing of mountain and text in his work to the famous Paramount Studios mountain logo - setting up the dialectical relationship between foreground and background in such a way that the landscape serves, much like the Hollywood hills, to simply heighten the drama of his text.
'I'm a prisoner of the idea of the landscape in painting and it's something I've continued to be tied to' (Ruscha quoted in R. D. Marshall, Ed Ruscha, London 2003, p. 180). Ed Ruscha has consistently formed an association between written words and landscapes and with the genre of landscape painting in general. This intrinsic connection between sign and landscape in Ruscha's art is revisited in a very literal sense in The Mountain, the second work produced for his series of mountain paintings. Executed in 1998, this ice-cool painting is consistent with Ruscha's most iconic works; a reductive yet playful synthesis of the text and its backdrop. While the backgrounds of many of Ruscha's paintings are often entirely arbitrary, The Mountain works in much the same way as Magritte's famous painting of a pipe, happily playing with the paradoxes between text and image by questioning their reliance on one another. Here, visual and verbal means of communication coexist and create a sense of friction. The word 'the' is a defining article, a noun marker that carries no descriptive qualities in itself, but serves to announce the object behind it. Yet, by raising the letter 'T' to mimic the mountain's verticality, Ruscha simultaneously uses the typography as imagery, thereby establishing its independence as a suggestive symbol or sign.
Ed Ruscha appears to have departed from his West Coast surroundings and source imagery when he began to appropriate imagery of the Himalayan Mountains in his work of the late 1990s, and yet they came to him, he explains, as 'a logical extension of the landscapes that I had been painting for a while - horizontal landscapes, flatlands, the landscape I grew up in' (Ruscha quoted in R. D. Marshall, Ed Ruscha, London 2003, p. 241). For The Mountain, he has chosen to depict the snow-capped summit of Mount Everest. As probably the most widely recognised peak in the world, the 'paint-by-numbers' style image represents the atypical idea of a mountain rather than a celebration of a unique aspect of nature, thereby becoming as generic as the word he has painted over it. In this way, Ruscha does not assert a sentimental stance to the landscape, even though mountain imagery typically serves as shorthand for the sublime. Instead, he subliminally references the west coast dreamland in which he lives by likening the pairing of mountain and text in his work to the famous Paramount Studios mountain logo - setting up the dialectical relationship between foreground and background in such a way that the landscape serves, much like the Hollywood hills, to simply heighten the drama of his text.