STAGES

Ed Ruscha

Ed Ruscha (b. 1937) was born in Omaha, Nebraska, and raised in Oklahoma before attending art school in Los Angeles, the city with which his work is most strongly identified.

By the early ’60s he was associated with the pioneering Ferus Gallery group led by Walter Hopps and was a participant in the 1962 exhibition “New Painting of Common Objects” at the Pasadena Art Museum, an event recognized as one of the earliest codifications of the Pop Art movement.

Since this period, he has consistently experimented with painting words and phrases, often allowing them to float on the canvas, detached from any ground; this theme has become an indelible visual hallmark of Ruscha’s oeuvre.

Vital to the Core

Ed Ruscha Acrylic on linen, 61cm x 89cm.

© Ed Ruscha, Courtesy Gagosian Gallery./span>

The influence of his surroundings is readily apparent in his work, as evidenced by the photo books he produced based on the suburban vernacular of Southern California — gas stations, parking lots, the Sunset strip, swimming pools, palm trees — and by numerous paintings, from his 1962 take on the 20th Century Fox logo, Large Trademark with Eight Spotlights, to his more recent “Metro Plots” series.

Ruscha’s piece for STAGES follows his continued explorations of painted text, incorporating rays of light streaming through an open window to illuminate the yellow-hued text “Vital to the Core,” a phrase that succinctly captures the mission of the Lance Armstrong Foundation and Lance’s own personal drive.

The subject of numerous museum retrospectives and the U.S. representative at the 51st Venice Biennale in 2005, Ruscha is represented by Gagosian Gallery.