The Museum of Modern Art presents ED RUSCHA / NOW THEN, the most comprehensive retrospective of the artist's work ever staged, and his first solo exhibition at the Museum, from September 10, 2023 through January 13, 2024.
I don't have any Seine River like Monet...I've just got US 66 between Oklahoma and Los Angeles. - Ed Ruscha
Organized in close collaboration with the artist and mirroring his own cross-disciplinary approach, the exhibition features over 200 works, produced from 1958 to the present, in various media. Alongside the artist's most acclaimed works, the exhibition will highlight lesser-known aspects of his practice, offering new perspectives on one of the most influential figures in postwar American art.
In 1956, Ruscha left his hometown of Oklahoma City and drove along interstate highway 66 to study commercial art in Los Angeles, where he drew inspirtation from the city's architecture, colloquial speech, and popular culture. Ruscha has recorded and transformed familiar subjects - whether roadside gasoline stations or the 20th Century Fox logo- often revisiting motifs, sites, or words years later. Tracing shifts in the artist's means and methods over time, ED RUSCHA / NOW THEN underscores the continuous reinvention that has defined his work.
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The Lapis Press is pleased to have published works featured in this exhibition, including WEN OUT FOR CIGRETS N NEVER CAME BACK by Ed Ruscha. Created by innovating with the classical lost wax process of bronze casting, WEN OUT FOR CIGRETS N NEVER CAME BACK joins an ancient technique with one of the most iconic contemporary artists of our time. The cast bronze edition takes Ruscha's oblique use of language to the third dimension, bringing negative space and shadow to life. This sculpture represents the first time Ruscha has ever worked wholly in three dimensions - from the initial concept through to the final object.
WEN OUT FOR CIGRETS N NEVER CAME BACK sprung from a seriffed font hand-drawn by Ed Ruscha specifically for this work. The subtle variations in each of these letters were carefully transferred from ink to bronze to ensure Ruscha’s hand is always present. The text has an enigmatic storytelling quality that goes around the steering wheel shape like a refrain in a country song about a hard hewn life. The music of this phrase is classic American vernacular, the hard “r”s and dropped consonants spoken with sideways innuendo. Car culture, wanderlust, beginnings and endings come to mind, conjuring the restless spirits of literary heroes. From the perspective of text as object, WEN OUT FOR CIGRETS N NEVER CAME BACK can be read as a continuation of Ruscha’s practice of culling words and phrases from their context. In this case, however, the text has become the object, or more precisely, was born as object. As Ruscha’s first work fully realized as sculpture, WEN OUT FOR CIGRETS N NEVER CAME BACK provides a glimpse into a pivotal new dimension of this seminal artist’s work.
