Edward Ruscha Gallery
Annie, Poured from Maple Syrup, 1966
55 x 59 in. (139.7 x 149.9 cm)
Norton Simon Museum

A painter and graphic artist, Ruscha was a young leader in the California Pop Art movement of the 1960s. He developed his own ironic and commercial iconography, with impeccable lettering and design technique. His word paintings are divorced from contextual meaning. They are rendered either in imitation of physical substance (here maple syrup) or by the use of an actual, physical substance (such as gunpowder). In Ruscha's paintings and lithographs, the execution is performed with virtuoso economy, eschewing all painterly gesture and thereby heightening the surrealist flavor already implicit in the ambiguously dislocated words.

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Standard Station
Purely Polyester
Picture H House
Cheese Oval
Annie
Pools
Main Street
Certain Trail

Biography


Bulletin Board


Renowned Art
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Edward Joseph Ruscha (1937-
Ruscha was born in Omaha, raised in Oklahoma and moved to Los Angeles in the late 1950s to study commercial art. His work questions the values of traditional symbols and calls attention to our role in art and culture by highlighting our intuitions through his use of words, color and proportion. Words or blocks of color often float on that part of a panorama where the sky meets the ground.
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