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Lot Essay
‘A lot of my paintings are anonymous backdrops for the drama of words… I have a background, foreground. It’s so simple. And the backgrounds are of no particular character. They’re just meant to support the drama, like the Hollywood sign being held up by sticks’
–Ed Ruscha
‘Usually in my paintings, I’m creating some sort of disorder between the different elements, and avoiding the recognizable aspect of living things by painting words. I like the feeling of an enormous pressure in a painting’
–Ed Ruscha
Ed Ruscha’s juxtapositions of text and dramatic background have captivated viewers since he first developed his signature style in the 1960s. Ruscha’s works explore the provocations of popular imagery and the juxtapositions of light and dark, land and sky, with a style and technique of extraordinary creativity. A striking and beautifully executed speckled nightscape reverse-stencilled with a seemingly incongruous phrase, Collision Frame Repair, 2010, is a continuation of a series started in the late 1990s in which Ruscha invites his viewers to engage in dialogue with provocatively vague texts. For these works, Ruscha drew inspiration from photographs, commercial logos, and from his imagination. This thread of reference extends throughout Ruscha’s oeuvre, making manifest the artist’s fascination with the culture of spectacle specific to Southern California, which might evoke the famous landmark sign fronting the Hollywood Hills’s Mount Lee in Los Angeles: ‘A lot of my paintings are anonymous backdrops for the drama of words … I have a background, foreground. It’s so simple. And the backgrounds are of no particular character. They’re just meant to support the drama, like the Hollywood sign being held up by sticks’ (E. Ruscha, quoted in R. Marshall, Ed Ruscha, New York, 2003, p. 239).
Ruscha’s choice of words, like the significance of his backgrounds, is often left open to interpretation. With them he has been known to refer to street names of his Los Angeles neighbourhood and to allude to various cultural slang phrases or pop culture jargon. Less ambiguous than other works in this series however, Collision Frame Repair is most probably inspired by a remembered billboard fragment of an auto repair business. Ruscha’s choice of words represents a thin-veiled critique of the endless driving along billboard-lined highways, which has become one of Los Angeles’ defining semiotic experiences. The work is an ironic comment on a culture defined by an excess of sedentariness that is ultimately unsustainable and which therefore requires rehabilitation or – as the title suggests – repair. Collision Frame Repair is as highly cerebral as it is aesthetically exhilarating, its imagery embedding a frisson of associations that enlivens and enriches its formal content.
–Ed Ruscha
‘Usually in my paintings, I’m creating some sort of disorder between the different elements, and avoiding the recognizable aspect of living things by painting words. I like the feeling of an enormous pressure in a painting’
–Ed Ruscha
Ed Ruscha’s juxtapositions of text and dramatic background have captivated viewers since he first developed his signature style in the 1960s. Ruscha’s works explore the provocations of popular imagery and the juxtapositions of light and dark, land and sky, with a style and technique of extraordinary creativity. A striking and beautifully executed speckled nightscape reverse-stencilled with a seemingly incongruous phrase, Collision Frame Repair, 2010, is a continuation of a series started in the late 1990s in which Ruscha invites his viewers to engage in dialogue with provocatively vague texts. For these works, Ruscha drew inspiration from photographs, commercial logos, and from his imagination. This thread of reference extends throughout Ruscha’s oeuvre, making manifest the artist’s fascination with the culture of spectacle specific to Southern California, which might evoke the famous landmark sign fronting the Hollywood Hills’s Mount Lee in Los Angeles: ‘A lot of my paintings are anonymous backdrops for the drama of words … I have a background, foreground. It’s so simple. And the backgrounds are of no particular character. They’re just meant to support the drama, like the Hollywood sign being held up by sticks’ (E. Ruscha, quoted in R. Marshall, Ed Ruscha, New York, 2003, p. 239).
Ruscha’s choice of words, like the significance of his backgrounds, is often left open to interpretation. With them he has been known to refer to street names of his Los Angeles neighbourhood and to allude to various cultural slang phrases or pop culture jargon. Less ambiguous than other works in this series however, Collision Frame Repair is most probably inspired by a remembered billboard fragment of an auto repair business. Ruscha’s choice of words represents a thin-veiled critique of the endless driving along billboard-lined highways, which has become one of Los Angeles’ defining semiotic experiences. The work is an ironic comment on a culture defined by an excess of sedentariness that is ultimately unsustainable and which therefore requires rehabilitation or – as the title suggests – repair. Collision Frame Repair is as highly cerebral as it is aesthetically exhilarating, its imagery embedding a frisson of associations that enlivens and enriches its formal content.