Ed Ruscha
Painted single words in a flat Los Angeles light, and photographed every building on the Sunset Strip.
Ed Ruscha was born in Omaha in 1937, grew up in Oklahoma City and drove to Los Angeles in 1956 to study commercial art. The city gave him everything: the Standard station, the Hollywood sign, the flat sunset gradients, and the artist's books — Twentysix Gasoline Stations, Every Building on the Sunset Strip — which he printed himself in the early 1960s and which are now foundational to conceptual publishing. The word paintings put a single term in a designed typeface against a plain or atmospheric ground, and he has made them in gunpowder, blood, chocolate and axle grease as well as oil.
The artist's books are a distinct and important market: originally cheap, printed in editions of a few hundred to a few thousand, and now valued on printing, condition and whether the copy is signed — first printings in fine condition are far ahead of later ones. The prints, catalogued by Engberg, are extensive and well documented. Organic-medium works from the 1970s, made with food and other perishable materials, have real stability problems. Word paintings on canvas lead the market and depend on flawless flat surfaces.
If you own a work by Ed Ruscha
Send photographs and whatever paperwork came with it. The first question is what the work actually is — edition or unique, when, and in what condition — because everything else follows from the answer. A valuation costs nothing and commits you to nothing.
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Whitebank Fine Art is an art advisory and gallery, not an auction house, and is not affiliated with any auction house or with the artist, their estate or their representatives. This page describes the range we advise on. Nothing here is investment advice.