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拍品專文
‘I began to believe that it is not so much what you say that matters, but how you say it. This ruled out so-called emotional painting. Everything should be preplanned.’ ED RUSCHA
This remarkable early work by Edward Ruscha demonstrates his initial flirtation with abstraction, before he rejected the genre in lieu of a self-confessed ‘premeditated’ approach to pop art. Fifteen unidentical, bluey-black ‘spots’, aligned against a neutral background, recall the gestural spontaneity of the abstract expressionists, a style taught and encouraged at Ruscha’s alma mater, the Chouinard Art Institute in downtown Los Angeles. Curiously, this work prefigures the later abstract splatters found in Ruscha’s 1969 Stains book, a quest for new organic and artificial media, pursued by ‘staining’ a variety of materials with artistically unorthodox substances. Untitled also opens Ruscha’s life-long fascination with serialism and sequencing. The neat alignment of the spots organisationally mirrors the meticulous sequential layout of Ruscha’s many books, including Nine Swimming Pools (1968) and Records (1971). However, Untitled also hints at Ruscha’s immediate progressive interests, with his dabbling in screenprinting surely piqued by Warhol’s new artistic methods of reproduction. Whilst anticipating several important facets from the future of Ruscha’s career, Untitled also marks a temporary farewell to abstraction, relinquished to pave the way for a new stylistic focus; as Ruscha recalled, ‘I began to believe that it is not so much what you say that matters, but how you say it. This ruled out so-called emotional painting. Everything should be preplanned’ (E. Ruscha, quoted in Ed Ruscha and the Great American West, exh. cat., Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco, San Francisco, 2016, p. 195).
This remarkable early work by Edward Ruscha demonstrates his initial flirtation with abstraction, before he rejected the genre in lieu of a self-confessed ‘premeditated’ approach to pop art. Fifteen unidentical, bluey-black ‘spots’, aligned against a neutral background, recall the gestural spontaneity of the abstract expressionists, a style taught and encouraged at Ruscha’s alma mater, the Chouinard Art Institute in downtown Los Angeles. Curiously, this work prefigures the later abstract splatters found in Ruscha’s 1969 Stains book, a quest for new organic and artificial media, pursued by ‘staining’ a variety of materials with artistically unorthodox substances. Untitled also opens Ruscha’s life-long fascination with serialism and sequencing. The neat alignment of the spots organisationally mirrors the meticulous sequential layout of Ruscha’s many books, including Nine Swimming Pools (1968) and Records (1971). However, Untitled also hints at Ruscha’s immediate progressive interests, with his dabbling in screenprinting surely piqued by Warhol’s new artistic methods of reproduction. Whilst anticipating several important facets from the future of Ruscha’s career, Untitled also marks a temporary farewell to abstraction, relinquished to pave the way for a new stylistic focus; as Ruscha recalled, ‘I began to believe that it is not so much what you say that matters, but how you say it. This ruled out so-called emotional painting. Everything should be preplanned’ (E. Ruscha, quoted in Ed Ruscha and the Great American West, exh. cat., Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco, San Francisco, 2016, p. 195).