Books by Ralph Rugoff
Ed Ruscha: Fifty Years of Painting
by James Ellroy, Bruce Wagner, Ralph Rugoff, Alexandra Schwartz, Ulrich Wilmes
Transforming words into icons and images into wide-screen epics, Ed Ruscha has wholly reconceived the terms of painting for our era. Tagged variously as a Conceptualist, Pop artist or latter-day Surrealist, Ruscha flouts category, or rather incorporates all categories, always surprising and experimenting with both subject and method. His paintings are steeped in our times: cinema, advertising, logos, late capitalism and the twists and turns of postwar art have all informed his iconography since the early 1960s, arriving on the cool surfaces of his canvases with magnetic detachment. Ruscha eschews process and focuses exclusively on the final product: “the means to the end has always been secondary in my art,” he has said. Ruscha has also reinvented the use of words in art, finding disquieting ways to invest language with a weird, throbbing, ambient static, never aspiring to what he calls “word gestures,” since “each word is an excursion unto itself.” Fifty Years of Painting focuses on Ruscha's majestic oeuvre of paintings. A magnificent publication, it comes housed in a slipcase that sports the artist's classic painting “Standard Station” (1966), and, alongside fantastic reproductions, it contains a preface by novelist James Ellroy, essays by Ralph Rugoff, Alexandra Schwartz and Ulrich Wilmes, a text by novelist Bruce Wagner, an interview with the artist by Kristine McKenna, an illustrated chronology and an exhibition history.
Ed Ruscha (born 1937) has made pioneering work in the media of painting, printmaking, drawing, bookmaking, photography and film since 1958. Associated in the early 1960s with the Ferus Gallery, Ruscha was included in Walter Hopps' landmark Pop art show New Painting of Common Objects, at the Pasadena Art Museum in 1962.
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George Condo: Mental States
by David Means, Will Self, Ralph Rugoff, Laura Hoptman, George Condo
Painter and sculptor George Condo (born 1957) has inhabited a broad swath of cultural contexts over his three-decade career, from the early-1980s East Village scene to a collaboration with William Burroughs to making album cover art for Phish and, most recently, Kanye West. Early in his career, Condo was friendly with Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring and briefly worked at Andy Warhol's Factory. Having been included in the Whitney Biennial in 1987, by 2010 he was once again judged so original that a bronze sculpture of his was placed in that year's Biennial. Condo's loose, imaginative approach to portraiture has distinguished him throughout the decades: "There was a time when I realized that the central focal point of portraiture did not have to be representational in any way," he said in 1992. "You don't need to paint the body to show the truth about a character. All you need is the head and the hands." George Condo: Mental States surveys the artist's career from 1982 to the present day, focusing on his portrait paintings but also including a selection of sculptural busts made in materials such as gold and bronze. Organized by theme, and including 100 images of artworks in addition to writings by Will Self, David Means, Ralph Rugoff and Laura Hoptman, this volume explores Condo's relationship to art history, popular culture and contemporary society.
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Paul McCarthy - Revised and Expanded Edition (Phaidon Contemporary Artist Series)
by Massimiliano Gioni, Ralph Rugoff, Kristine Stiles
Definitive monograph on America's most challenging and influential artist
Los-Angeles-based artist Paul McCarthy (b.1945) creates Disneyesque installations, sculptures of animal/vegetable/human hybrids and slapstick performances in a purge of a national subconscious. The psycho-sexual desires and anxieties induced by the media and the built environment of contemporary America emerge in his collisions of plastic prosthetic limbs and condiments that stand in for bodily fluids.
These works have been variously deployed: through live actions, often documented on video, and more recently in outsized figures and artificial rural environments, combined in overtly sexual ways. McCarthy's work echoes that of European artists such as Joseph Beuys or the Viennese Aktionistes, but gives 'action art' a postmodern twist.
This new revised and expanded edition includes contributions by luminaries such as Kristine Stiles, Ralph Rugoff, Massimiliano Gioni and Robert Storr.
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Ed Ruscha: Tom Sawyer Paintings
Published to document the exhibition Ed Ruscha: Tom Sawyer Paintings, this lavishly illustrated bilingual English and French catalogue features new essays by Mark Godfrey and Ralph Rugoff.
Ed Ruscha: Tom Sawyer Paintings documents the 2022 exhibition of ten new paintings and a new hologram at Gagosian Paris. The exhibition brought together naturalistic paintings of simple wooden slats, which at once represent a new direction in Ruscha’s work and extend his long-standing interest in realism, modernist abstraction, and the American vernacular.
The catalogue includes plate photography of the ten paintings and one hologram as well as installation views of the exhibition.
Ed Ruscha was born in 1937 in Omaha, Nebraska and lives and works in Los Angeles. A career-spanning retrospective, ED RUSCHA/NOW THEN, will open at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in September 2023 and travel to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in April 2024.
Since 1993, Gagosian has presented twenty-five major exhibitions of Ruscha’s work in the United States and Europe.
New, illustrated essays by Mark Godfrey and Ralph Rugoff, offering critical and historical contexts for the work, are included in this bilingual English and French catalogue.
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Hiroshi Sugimoto Time Machine
by Edmund de Waal, Margaret Wertheim, Allie Biswas, Geoffrey Batchen, Ralph Rugoff, James Attlee, David Chipperfield, Mami Kataoka, Lara Strongman
Der international renommierte Künstler und Fotograf Hiroshi Sugimoto hat durch seine ausgiebigen Erkundungen der Möglichkeiten von Fotografie einige der verführerischsten und rätselhaftesten Bildwerke unserer Zeit geschaffen. Hiroshi Sugimoto: Time Machine bietet einen umfassenden Überblick über die Arbeiten der letzten fünf Jahrzehnte. Die Publikation vereint seine wichtigsten fotografischen Serien wie Theaters und Seascapes, bis zu weniger bekannten Werken, die seinen innovativen, konzeptionellen Ansatz beleuchten. Beiträge von internationalen Schriftsteller*innen, Künstler*innen und Wissenschaftler*innen – darunter James Attlee, Allie Biswas, David Chipperfield, Edmund de Waal, Mami Kataoka, Ralph Rugoff, Lara Strongman und Margaret Wertheim – beleuchten seine philosophische und zugleich spielerische Auseinandersetzung mit unserem Verständnis von Zeit und Erinnerung sowie dem paradoxen Charakter der Fotografie zwischen Dokumentation und Erfindung.
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