Paintings

Ten paintings in which Ruscha's road-trip iconography is given the light, finish and atmosphere of old master painting, the American landscape rendered as something already ruined.

Published for Ed Ruscha: Paintings at Gagosian, Rome (20 November 2014 – 10 February 2015), the bilingual English/Italian catalogue reproduces all ten works in color together with installation photography, an essay by Alex Kitnick and an interview with the artist by Bob Monk. Among the paintings are Gators (2014), meticulously rendered shredded tires floating against a blank white ground, and Bliss Bucket (2014), a mattress with rumpled bedding lying beneath a giant musical bar and treble clef foreshortened for depth. Hardcover, 56 pages, designed by McCall Associates, New York.

Ruscha (b. 1937) has traced the decline of the American landscape across decades of painting, from Course of Empire (his 2005 project for the United States pavilion at the Venice Biennale, built on Thomas Cole's five-painting sequence of a landscape passing from wilderness to development to desolation) through the elegiac Psycho Spaghetti Westerns of 2011, to which these works form a coda.