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With his iconic interpretations of American society throughout the past five decades, Ed Ruscha (b. 1937) stands firm as one of the leading postwar artists of our time. This autumn you can experience a selection of his works at KODE, in collaboration with the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art.
Ed Ruscha is one of the most celebrated artists of the postwar era. Throughout his artistic career he has exhibited at, and been bought up by a long line of prominent institutions the world over, such as Tate Modern in London, MOMA and the Whitney Museum of American Art i New York and Haus der Kunst in Munich.
Ruscha is particularly known for his restrained, sober reproductions of Hollywood logos, stylised gasoline stations and archetypal American landscapes. With motifs taken from locations around California, he became one of Los Angeles’ foremost exponents of Pop art, together with David Hockney, among others. It is not surprising that Ruscha’s nickname in the American art world has been “King of the West Coast”.
Via different techniques such as painting, printmaking and photography Ruscha has become famous for his way of combining text, images, objects and landscapes in his works. Ruscha’s motifs are simultaneously simple and cinematic, and filled with subtle codes. Using the perspective of the road, the windshield and the movie screen his art has a distinct spatial dimension associated with the flat cityscapes of L.A. and the surrounding desert. Ruscha’s comprehensive documentation of the city’s everyday architecture has also been expressed in some of his famous photographic artist’s books from the 1960s and 70s, with revealing titles such as “Every building on the Sunset Strip” and “Twentysix Gasoline Stations”.
The exhibition “Ed Ruscha – VERY” is a collaboration with the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art. The exhibition presents a selection of works on paper beginning in the 1960s and following his career up to the present, which are on loan from the UBS Art Collection and include studies for some of his most iconic paintings and art publications.
