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24/9/2012

Ed Ruscha

Kunsthistorisches Museum, Wien

An exhibition of the Kunsthistorisches Museum Wien, curated by Ed Ruscha Ed Ruscha (born 1937, Nebraska, USA) is one of the most internationally respected artists of our time. Restlessly inventive, he has worked between painting, drawing, printmaking, photography and graphic design for more than half a century. In 1961, as part of a long road-trip through Europe, Ruscha made a special visit to the Kunsthistorisches Museum. Exactly fifty years later, he was invited by the museum to return to Vienna, and to spend time with its curators and explore its collections. The idea: to select his own ‘private collection’ of objects from among the many thousands at the museum.

This single-room exhibition, for which each object was personally chosen by the artist, is the result. The thread that unites these works is the eye of the artist who chose them. The challenge and pleasure for the visitor is to try to match our eye to his, to understand the reasoning behind his preferences. In doing so, we are encouraged to look again at works that we think we know well, and to question the value of certain objects over others. Just as importantly, this process serves to cast light on Ruscha’s own work, and the thinking and decisions that lie behind it.

Looking at the objects that Ruscha has chosen, strands of thought soon begin to emerge. From his childhood collections of coins and postage stamps, to his early books such as Nine Swimming Pools (1968) and Twentysix Gasoline Stations (1963), the artist has long been fascinated by notions of taxonomy, the desire to classify and quantify the world around us. Within the exhibition this can be perceived not only in a real, quasi-scientific sense, but also fantastical and practically absurd. Closely related to this is Ruscha’s interest in art and nature - from painted studies of animals and flowers, to actual preserved specimens – and the point at which the two meet: the Kunstkammer, with its extraordinary holdings of exotica, naturalia, scientifica and artificialia. And for those visitors more familiar with Ruscha’s own work, there are curious and often unexpected rhymes to be found: widescreen formats, bird’s eye perspective, text and printing, and more. The title of the exhibition, a line borrowed from his compatriot Mark Twain, says it all.

The majority of objects in the exhibition are drawn from two of the museum’s collections: the Picture Gallery and the Kunstkammer, widely regarded as the most important of its kind anywhere in the world, which will reopen in February 2013 following a decade-long renovation. In addition, the exhibition will present objects from Schloss Ambras, the Natural History Museum in Vienna, and a private collection in the United States, which generously agreed to lend Ed Ruscha’s own work “Wanze”, the only German-language drawing that he has ever made, which was produced in response to his visit to Austria in 1961. This exhibition is the first in a series for which internationally-renowned artists will be invited to work with the collections of the Kunsthistorisches Museum. The series was conceived by Jasper Sharp, the museum’s Adjunct Curator for Modern and Contemporary Art.

Biography of Ed Ruscha
Ed Ruscha is among the most important and influential artists of our time. Born in 1937 in Omaha, Nebraska, he moved to Oklahoma City in 1941 and to Los Angeles in 1956 to attend the Chouinard Art Institute. His work was included in the landmark 1962 exhibition “New Painting of Common Objects” at the Pasadena Museum of Art, the first museum survey of American Pop art, and in 1963 he had his first solo exhibition at the Ferus Gallery, Los Angeles. At the beginning of the 1970s, Ruscha began showing his work with the Leo Castelli Gallery in New York.
Ruscha has consistently combined the cityscape of Los Angeles with vernacular language to communicate a particular urban experience. Encompassing photography, drawing, painting, and artist books, Ruscha’s work holds the mirror up to the banality of urban life and gives order to the barrage of mass media-fed images and information that confront us daily. Ruscha’s early career as a graphic artist continues to strongly influence his aesthetic and thematic approach.
Ruscha has been the subject of numerous museum retrospectives, which have traveled worldwide, beginning in 1982 with the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Centre Georges Pompidou in 1989, and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in 2000. In 2001, Ruscha was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters as a member of the Department of Art.
In 2004, The Whitney Museum of American Art organized two simultaneous exhibitions: “Cotton Puffs, Q-tips®, Smoke and Mirrors: The Drawings of Ed Ruscha”, which traveled to the Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles and then to the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., and “Ed Ruscha and Photography”. The following year, Ruscha was selected to represent the United States at the 51st Venice Biennale.
In 2009, the Hayward Gallery, London mounted a retrospective of the artist’s paintings, “Ed Ruscha: Fifty Years of Painting”, which traveled to Haus der Kunst, Munich, and Moderna Museet, Stockholm in 2010.

The exhibition at the Kunsthistorisches Museum will run concurrently with an important solo exhibition of his work at the Kunsthaus Bregenz, entitled “Reading Ed Ruscha”, which opened in July 2012 and remains on display until October 14, 2012. The two exhibitions present Ed Ruscha’s work for the first time in Austria.

The exhibition is accompanied by an illustrated catalogue, designed in collaboration with the artist, and a limited edition print produced specially for the Kunsthistorisches Museum.

Nina Auinger-Sutterlüty
Director of the Department of Communication and Marketing Tel.: + 43 1 525244021 Fax: + 43 1 525244098 e-mail: info.pr@khm.at

Kunsthistorisches Museum
Maria Theresien-Platz 1010 Vienna
ENTRANCE FEES
Adults € 12,– Concessions € 9,– Vienna Card € 11,– Groups of 10 or over € 8,– Children under 19 free
OPENING HOURS
Tuesdays – Sundays 10 a.m. – 6 p.m.
Thursdays 10 a.m. – 9 p.m.
(The Coin Collection closes at 6 p.m.)

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