Ed Ruscha: Tom Sawyer Paintings (Ralph)

Published to document the exhibition Ed Ruscha: Tom Sawyer Paintings, this lavishly illustrated bilingual English and French catalogue features new essays by Mark Godfrey and Ralph Rugoff.

Ed Ruscha: Tom Sawyer Paintings documents the 2022 exhibition of ten new paintings and a new hologram at Gagosian Paris. The exhibition brought together naturalistic paintings of simple wooden slats, which at once represent a new direction in Ruscha’s work and extend his long-standing interest in realism, modernist abstraction, and the American vernacular.

The catalogue includes plate photography of the ten paintings and one hologram as well as installation views of the exhibition. 

Ed Ruscha was born in 1937 in Omaha, Nebraska and lives and works in Los Angeles. A career-spanning retrospective, ED RUSCHA/NOW THEN, will open at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in September 2023 and travel to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in April 2024.

Since 1993, Gagosian has presented twenty-five major exhibitions of Ruscha’s work in the United States and Europe.

New, illustrated essays by Mark Godfrey and Ralph Rugoff, offering critical and historical contexts for the work, are included in this bilingual English and French catalogue.

Mark Godfrey is an independent curator based in London. Recent and forthcoming exhibitions include Laura Owens & Vincent van Gogh at the Fondation Vincent van Gogh Arles, France; Jacqueline Humphries: jHΩ1:) at the Wexner Center for the Arts, Ohio State University, Columbus; and Nicole Eisenman: What Happened at Museum Brandhorst, Munich and the Whitechapel Gallery, London. From 2007 to 2021 he was a senior curator at Tate Modern, London, where he curated retrospectives of Francis Alÿs, Alighiero Boetti, Richard Hamilton, Roni Horn, Sigmar Polke, Gerhard Richter, and Franz West, as well as Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power.
Ralph Rugoff has been the director of the Hayward Gallery, London, since 2006, where he curated the exhibition Ed Ruscha: Fifty Years of Painting in 2009. Prior to this he was director of CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, San Francisco. In 2019 he served as artistic director of the 58th Venice Biennale and in 2015 he curated the 13th Biennale de Lyon, France.