ArtJunk
No. 06—2025

Photographs

Zander Galerie

Ed Ruscha

Info: The exhibition Ed Ruscha. Photographs features a selection of work by the American artist from the 1960s to the 2010s. Ruscha is considered as one of the most unconventional and influential contemporary artists today. His work defies easy categorization as Pop Art or Conceptual Art, hence the writer J.G. Ballard once simply described him as having the coolest gaze in American art. Ruscha’s imagery is rooted in the West Coast lifestyle and topography: the phenomena of mass culture and the myths of Hollywood and the open road. Inspired by Walker Evans and Robert Frank, he went on a journey taking apparently casual photographs of gas stations along Route 66 between his home-town Oklahoma City and Los Angeles. Prints from this first series Twentysix Gasoline Stations (1962), is presented alongside photographic works of mundane architectures in the same factual aesthetics: Apartment Buildings, Swimming Pools, Parking Lots, Products. Ruscha’s innovative use of bold typography often seems at odds with painterly backgrounds, reflecting the fact that larger-than-life billboards have become part of the landscape. (…)

Zander Galerie Köln Ed Ruscha ArtJunk