Sometimes I wonder whether I am painting pictures of words or whether I’m painting pictures with words.
—Ed Ruscha
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| Fanned Book |
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| Old Book Today |
The highlight of my Saturday Chelsea Gallery walk was the Ed Ruscha show at the Gagosian Gallery on West 24th Street. Ruscha pays tribute to the printed book in his super-scaled realistic paintings of rare books, painstakingly capturing the marbled endpapers, or the yellow fox marks on a blank page. I loved the smaller paintings that present text distilled into their rectangular ghosts, footprints of phrases that correlate to the length of the words. Ruscha also manipulates actual books, using the covers as supports for painting. In the age of digital reading, these works convey a reverence for the tradition of the printed form.
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| installation view |
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