Edward Ruscha

The Catalogue Raisonné of the Paintings of Ed Ruscha is a six-volume series of books co-published by Steidl and Gagosian Gallery. This is the second volume, which contains entries on 178 paintings completed between 1971 and 1982--from the artist's crisis at the onset of the 70s, when he “quits painting pictures,” to his first major museum retrospective, which opened in March 1982 at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. The catalogue includes a comprehensive exhibition history, bibliography and biographical chronology, as well as a preface by the editor Robert Dean, an essay by UCLA film historian Peter Wollen examining Ruscha's use of color as it relates to his use of language, and an essay by the late Reyner Banham.

Each volume of the catalogue, designed by Bruce Mau, has a stitched binding and a cloth cover with silver-colored embossing protected by an embossed slipcase. Specifications for subsequent volumes are the same.

Ed Ruscha was born in Omaha, Nebraska in 1937 and grew up in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma from 1941 to 1956. He moved to Los Angeles, California and attended the Chouinard Art Institute from 1956 to 1960. His work has been exhibited internationally and is represented in major museums and private collections throughout the world. In 2001, Ruscha was elected to The American Academy of Arts and Letters as a member of the Department of Art. He has been chosen by the U.S. Department of State to represent the United States at the 2005 Venice Biennale. This season Steidl is also publishing Ed Ruscha's first artist's book since 1972 THEN & NOW.