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Item Number: 115647
Title: ED RUSCHA : Psycho Spaghetti Westerns
Author: Ferguson, Russell
Price: Not Available
ISBN: 9781935263401
Description: New York: Gagosian Gallery, 2011. 35 x 28cm., hardcover, 66pp. illus. Exhibition catalogue. From the gallery's website: Psycho Spaghetti Westerns are a surreal extension of the ideas that motivated the Course of Empire series, with which Ruscha represented the U.S. at the 2005 Biennale di Venezia. Course of Empire was inspired by five paintings by Thomas Cole of the Hudson River School, which depict the same landscape over time as it declines from a pristine natural state into desolation. Similarly, Ruscha has documented the effects of time on landscape in a manner that is both empirical and metaphorically charged, creating finely nuanced exercises in perception and memory that he describes as waste and retrieval. In these wide horizontal paintings, landscape becomes a mental construct of abutting abstract surfaces one a sfumato backdrop, the other a representational ground (grass, scrub, rock). This structure a strong diagonal that cuts the picture plane, dividing background from foreground is a pictorial device that Ruscha has often used, dating back as far as the Standard Station paintings of the 1960s. Here it provides a near-neutral picture plane for meticulously rendered still lifes in which incidental trash tire shreds, beer cans, construction materials, packaging, and discarded mattresses provide for reflection on the transformation of things by nature or culture.
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