Ed Ruscha

“Paintings”
Gagosian Gallery
New York, 541 West 24th Street

Since the 1960s, Ruscha has created a distinctive and ever-expanding lexicon of signs, symbols, images, and words drawn from vernacular America. His visual utterances, sounds, and concepts—such as the roadside gas station or the word “OOF”—have become embedded in the American ethos. He has presented recurring images—the American flag, mountains, books, and words—that are suggestive yet never didactic, and the development of these images over the course of his illustrious career exemplifies the wry refinement and subtlety with which he speaks through painting.

Installation view Artwork © Ed Ruscha. Photo: Rob McKeever

In these new paintings, Ruscha has chosen to revisit the flag, the mountain, and the tire. Flags entered Ruscha’s visual vocabulary between 1985 and 1987, rippling in the breeze over dramatic sunsets or triumphant blue skies, offset with subtle warning cues of black bars resembling censor strips. The motif returned in OUR FLAG (2017)—currently on view at the Brooklyn Museum, which served as a polling site for the November election—where it disintegrated into shreds set against a near-black sky. The flag becomes newly distorted in RIPPLING FLAG (2020), this time abnormally widened to extend past the right-side frame, its flowing surface creating twisted shapes and shadows over the red and white stripes. In Top of Flag (2020), only a fraction of the standard is visible at the bottom of the canvas, surrounded by a gradation of shadow, almost as though the flag were a setting sun or a dimming spotlight on a stage.

through January 23, 2021