Ed Ruscha: History Kids

This eight-color lithograph, printed in Venice, California, by Hamilton Press on Rives BFK paper, brings together three important constants of Ed Ruscha’s practice: a Hollywood-worthy sunset; a beguilingly ambiguous phrase (is “kids” a noun or a verb?), presented in the artist’s own no-nonsense Boy Scout Utility Modern typeface; and a hulking snowcapped mountain, one of his principal motifs of the past twenty-five years. Although the exacting hyperrealism of Ruscha’s peaks is due to their basis in photographic sources, he conceives of them less as specific sites than as “ideas of mountains, picturing some sort of unobtainable bliss or glory—rock and ways to fall, dangerous and beautiful.” This work is a color trial proof for the edition.