Ed Ruscha: Tom Sawyer Paintings

This book was published on the occasion of Ed Ruscha: Tom Sawyer Paintings at Gagosian, rue de Ponthieu, Paris. The exhibition featured a hologram and ten paintings, several of which depict wooden slats. Alluding to a famous episode in Mark Twain’s classic 1876 novel in which Sawyer cons his friends into whitewashing a fence, they also evoke earlier Ruscha works that reference Twain’s writings and extend the artist’s longtime fascination with wood as image, subject, support, and container. With compositions echoing the canvases’ concealed stretcher bars, the paintings are consistent with Ruscha’s absorption in Americana, and their heraldic quality recalls his many images of the Stars and Stripes. The bilingual (English/French) catalogue reproduces all the works in the exhibition along with installation photography, and includes new illustrated essays by Mark Godfrey and Ralph Rugoff.