.jpg?w=1)
Lot Essay
'In many of the works from the 1980s, Ruscha has chosen to leave words out altogether, replacing them by silhouetted images that are themselves enigmatic enough to force the issue of language into the open and by floating white rectangles or underliners whose references are often supplied by the painting's title. Here Ruscha is playing somewhat with both our familiarity with his work, and with the self described parameters of this art up to this point, by creating the expectation of language and then purposefully not supplying it' (D. Cameron, Ed Ruscha Paintings, Barcelona 1990, p. 15).
Europa, Ed Ruscha's dramatic portrait of a single galleon sailing across a vast ocean is a striking example from his Silhouette series in which the artist fuses together a diverse range of historical and cultural motifs into a dark web of complexity and intrigue. Ruscha's work from this period is seen by many as a metaphor for the decline of American society-the end of the courageous dream that was begun by the brave sailors who, using ships such as these, discovered a new continent, and one which the artist now feared was set adrift on the sea of uncertainty. Inspired by the black and white swashbuckling films of his youth and the bold monochromes of Franz Kline that he so admired, works such as Europa have become an important part of the artist's oeuvre and are included in major museum collections such as the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
Compositionally speaking the configuration of Europa recalls Ruscha's iconic early works such as Standard Station in which a strong diagonal line stretches out from a single point to command the entire canvas. With this line, Ruscha creates two enigmatic areas of space; one characterized by light, the other cast in shadow and continues a fascination with the properties of light which have been a strong theme throughout his career. Traversing this mythical line is a single galleon in full sail, with its sails outstretched and the boat heeling to one side to indicate its speedy passage. Creating a dynamic sense of movement in what is essentially a static image, has been one of the central themes in Ruscha's work, 'for me it got to the core of something I wanted to do..., which was to put speed into a flat, static picture. That composition put zoom in my work, and that's the essential ingredient of those pictures that I liked' (E. Ruscha quoted by K. McKenna, Ed Ruscha in Conversation, Ed Ruscha, exh. cat., Hayward Gallery, London, 2010, p. 57).
Europa, Ed Ruscha's dramatic portrait of a single galleon sailing across a vast ocean is a striking example from his Silhouette series in which the artist fuses together a diverse range of historical and cultural motifs into a dark web of complexity and intrigue. Ruscha's work from this period is seen by many as a metaphor for the decline of American society-the end of the courageous dream that was begun by the brave sailors who, using ships such as these, discovered a new continent, and one which the artist now feared was set adrift on the sea of uncertainty. Inspired by the black and white swashbuckling films of his youth and the bold monochromes of Franz Kline that he so admired, works such as Europa have become an important part of the artist's oeuvre and are included in major museum collections such as the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
Compositionally speaking the configuration of Europa recalls Ruscha's iconic early works such as Standard Station in which a strong diagonal line stretches out from a single point to command the entire canvas. With this line, Ruscha creates two enigmatic areas of space; one characterized by light, the other cast in shadow and continues a fascination with the properties of light which have been a strong theme throughout his career. Traversing this mythical line is a single galleon in full sail, with its sails outstretched and the boat heeling to one side to indicate its speedy passage. Creating a dynamic sense of movement in what is essentially a static image, has been one of the central themes in Ruscha's work, 'for me it got to the core of something I wanted to do..., which was to put speed into a flat, static picture. That composition put zoom in my work, and that's the essential ingredient of those pictures that I liked' (E. Ruscha quoted by K. McKenna, Ed Ruscha in Conversation, Ed Ruscha, exh. cat., Hayward Gallery, London, 2010, p. 57).