Prints & Multiples 
8 January 2025
Prints & Multiples 
197

Ed Ruscha and Billy Al Bengston

Business Cards

1968
offset printing on paper, gelatin silver print, stapled cards, leather 8¾ h × 5¾ w in (22 × 15 cm)
estimate: $1,000–1,500
result: $1,524
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Signed to cover ‘Billy Al Bengston / To Bill Wilson Ed Ruscha’. Stamped to cover 'Sep 29 1968'. This work is from the first edition of 1000 printed by Vaughan Printing Co., Santa Monica and published by Heavy Industry Publications, Hollywood.
literature: Engberg B7

This work will ship from Los Angeles, California.

print

Various First Editions

The Artist Books of Ed Ruscha

This artist book by Ed Ruscha arrives from a complete set of signed Ruscha first editions spanning the artist’s earliest title, TwentysixGasoline Stations (1963), to later titles including Dutch Details (1971) and Colored People (1972). A pioneer of the form, Ruscha used the artist book as a critical space for experimentation and development of ideas—key among them the relationship between text, image, and object, the use of a deadpan affect, a pseudo-documentary impulse trained towards “ordinary” things, and an interest in both American-ness and the American West vis-à-vis Los Angeles. 

There are things that I'm constantly looking at that I feel should be elevated to greater status, almost to philosophical status or to a religious status. That's why taking things out of context is a useful tool to an artist. It's the concept of taking something that's not subject matter and making it subject matter.

Ed Ruscha, Gagosian

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