Beschreibung:

Ed Ruscha Higher Standards/Lower Prices 2007 Acrylic on canvas in two parts. 48 x 110 in. (121.9 x 279.4 cm) each. Signed, titled and dated “Ed Ruscha ‘Higher Standards’ 2007” on the reverse of the left panel; signed, titled and dated “Ed Ruscha ‘Lower Prices’ 2007” on the reverse of the right panel. This work will be included in a forthcoming volume of Edward Ruscha: Catalogue Raisonné of the Paintings.
Provenance Gagosian Gallery, London Exhibited London, Gagosian Gallery, Ed Ruscha Paintings, February 5 – March 20, 2008 Literature B. Fer, Ed Ruscha Paintings, Ostfildern, 2008, n.p. (illustrated); B. Schwabsky, “Ed Ruscha: Talks About His Most Recent Paintings,” Artforum, New York, 2008, p. 358 (illustrated) Catalogue Essay "I was searching for a title and I saw this slogan on a grocery truck in LA . In the second of the two paintings these buildings suddenly shoot up out of nowhere like an instant industrial village of Wal-Marts and Costcos—so that says to me lower prices. But then you have your higher standards—there’s some serious geology going on in those mountains." (Ed Ruscha in O. Ward, “Ed Ruscha: Interview,” Time Out, London, 2007) Ed Ruscha’s response when asked what inspired the title of the present work, Higher Standards/Lower Prices, epitomizes his artistic career. Ruscha’s art tends to have a timeless quality to it, somehow managing to stay incredibly relevant without tying itself too much to one particular decade or movement. He culls inspiration from day to day American culture – in this case, the supersize stores and billboards that span the country. These symbols of consumer culture are as deeply rooted in the American vernacular as the mountains Ruscha paints. And what incredible mountains he paints. The towering white peaks he gives us are beautiful studies in geology and technique, deriving from a recognizable amalgam of famous mountains and hinting towards a long history of art historical relevance on the subject. Mountain imagery has always served as a visual shorthand for the sublime, from the pantheist canvases of Caspar David Friedrich and the Catskills of the Hudson River School to Ansel Adams’s photographs of the Rockies . Mountains, in their everyday untouchability, still seem like residences for the gods. But Ruscha resists knee-jerk spiritualism (and, one might argue, his own often mentioned dormant Catholicism) by emblazoning slogans that render the scenes absurd. M. Schwendener, “Ed Ruscha – Reviews”, ArtForum, New York , November, 2002 Ruscha is perhaps most widely known for his word paintings which he began in the 1960s. His clever word associations pop off brightly colored canvases daring the viewer to react. They range from one-off declarations such as OOF, LISP, Noise to longer phrases that cause the viewer to take a momentary puzzled pause. Ruscha would stumble upon these words, considering them to be his own version of Duchampian readymades. When the words began to invade his mountain paintings the result was boldly striking and beautifully absurd. The mountains receded to the background while statements such as THE and CO. threw themselves at the front of the plane with big, look-at-me lettering making it impossible not to enjoy these clever combinations. Much in the same way that the words thematically vandalize nature in these earlier mountain paintings, so do the buildings in the present work. The strength of Higher Standards/Lower Prices begins with the juxtaposition of the two panels next to each other. The diptychs is a comparative study. In both panels, the snow capped peaks of his mountains sparkle in warm sunlight under contrasting ashen sky. They remain wonderfully unadulterated in the first panel however, in the second panel the tops of two unrealistically tall buildings begin to obstruct the view of the mountains. The building rooftops are oddly and jarringly out of place against this pristine background. The way the rooftops appear to hover in the lower plane of the canvas creates a dynamically active canvas, as if they could, at any moment, continue to rise. This work is part of a series of seven works created by Ruscha in 2007. The presumably gargantuan size of these fictitious buildings speaks to how commercialism and consumerism are slowly encroaching on the natural world. This work is about before and after and the passage of time. The presence of these man-made st