The Hall Art Foundation is pleased to announce an exhibition by the internationally acclaimed American artist, Ed Ruscha to be held at its galleries in Reading, Vermont from 11 May – 1 December 2024.  The show begins with a group of Ruscha's seminal black-and-white photographs from 1962 and presents over a dozen works on paper that span five decades of his career.  Since the 1960s, Ruscha has explored the role of language in painting, drawing, photography, printmaking, and bookmaking by using the meaning and formal qualities of words as his principle subject matter. 

The gasoline station, a symbol of the American vernacular landscape, is perhaps Ruscha’s most iconic image. He began experimenting with the subject in his first artist's book, Twentysix Gasoline Stations (1963), which reproduces a series of banal photographs the artist took while driving on Route 66 between Los Angeles and his hometown of Oklahoma City, through Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas. Selected works (from 'Twenty-six Gasoline Stations') (1962) is a compilation of seven gelatin silver prints from the project. The photographs which are devoid of people and characterized by a frontal perspective and strong diagonals, document the utilitarian architecture dotting the American landscape.

In his earliest text drawings from the 1970s, such as America Has Three Climates: Cold Hot Moderate (1977), Ruscha employs a distinctive reverse-stenciling drawing technique. Placing individually cut out letters onto paper, Ruscha applies pigment around the letter shapes with unconventional tools such as cotton balls and Q-tips. The sheets are colored-in with pastel, dry pigment, as well as various organic and unconventional substances such as gunpowder, Pepto-Bismol, spinach, egg yolk and carrot juice. With a typography that is created using negative space rather than line, Ruscha’s letters are crisply defined against their grounds.

The words and phrases that Ruscha uses as his subjects are derived from American vernacular, advertising, and popular culture. Decontextualized from time and place, letters, words, and phrases take on a symbolic quality as Ruscha explores their formal qualities. In his series of ribbon words drawings, and in works such as Pig (1970) rendered in gunpowder and pastel, the letters P, I, and G take on a three-dimensional, architectural quality, creating an interplay between image and language. Ruscha has said “Sometimes I wonder whether I am painting pictures of words or whether I’m painting pictures with words.”

Hall Art Foundation
544 VT Route 106
Reading, VT 05062
United States
 

For more information and images, please contact the Foundation’s administrative office at info@hallartfoundation.org.