Ed Ruscha @gagosian #Rome

Gagosian Gallery Rome is pleased to announce an exhibition of new paintings by Ed Ruscha from November 20, 2014 to January 17, 2015

Ed Ruscha, one of the most important artists in the contemporary art world, has recorded the shifting emblems of American life and values in the form of Hollywood logos, stylized gas stations, and archetypal landscapes. His wry choice of words and indirect phrases in his works mines the perpetual interplay between the physicality of language and language as a transparent medium. Although his images are undeniably rooted in the vernacular of a closely observed American reality, his elegant, laconic art speaks to more complex and widespread issues regarding the appearance, feel, and function of the world and our tenuous and transient place within it.

Ed Ruscha was born in Omaha, Nebraska in 1937 and studied painting, photography, and graphic design at the Chouinard Art Institute (now CalArts). His work is collected by major museums worldwide. Major museum exhibitions include the drawing retrospective “Cotton Puffs, Q-Tips®, Smoke and Mirrors,” which toured U.S. museums in 2004–2005; “Ed Ruscha: Photographer,” Whitney Museum of American Art and the Musée National Jeu de Paume, Paris (2006); and, “Ed Ruscha: Fifty Years of Painting,” Hayward Gallery, London (2009, traveling to Haus der Kunst, Munich and Moderna Museet, Stockholm in 2010). “Ed Ruscha: Road Tested,” opened at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Texas in January 2011. “Reading Ed Ruscha,” Kunsthaus Bregenz, Austria 2012; “Ed Ruscha: Standard,” Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, (2012) and The Rose Art Museum, Waltham, MA (2012); “Ed Ruscha: Books and Paintings,” Brandhorst Museum, Munich (Germany, 2013); “Ed Ruscha: Los Angeles Apartments,” Kunstmuseum, Basel (2013); and “In Focus: Ed Ruscha,” The Getty Center, Los Angeles (2013). In 2005 he represented the United States at the Venice Biennale and in 2012 he curated “The Ancients Stole Our Great Ideas” at the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Wien (Austria).