The Harvard University Art Museums is presenting an
exhibition exploring the work of artists Ed Ruscha (American,
b. 1937) and Andreas Gursky (German, b. 1955). Landmark
Pictures: Ed Ruscha and Andreas Gursky opened January 8
and will remain on view though April 23, 2000. The exhibition
will be presented in two parts, the first (January 8 – March 19)
at the Busch-Reisinger Museum and the second (mid March
– late April) in the Sert Gallery, inaugurating the newly
renovated space in the Corbusier-designed Carpenter
Center for Visual and Performing Arts, adjacent to the Fogg
and Busch-Reisinger Museums.
The Art Museums have actively collected the art of our times
since the early twentieth century. Over the years, these
holdings have grown significantly, prompting the recent
creation of a curatorial department of modern and
contemporary art. The Sert Gallery will be dedicated to
contemporary art, and along with other programming at the
Art Museums, will allow us to expand our initiatives in this
area, said James Cuno, Elizabeth and John Moors Cabot
Director, Harvard University Art Museums. Landmark
Pictures also marks the beginning of collaborations
between the Art Museums and Harvard’s Visual and
Environmental Studies Department, which builds upon our
growing role with the University for fostering collaborations
between schools and departments.
Landmark Pictures: Ed Ruscha and Andreas Gursky
encompasses more than forty objects, including paintings,
drawings, prints, photographs and books. Both artists are
well known for their large-scale images of recognizable sites
– Ruscha for the particular L.A. and Hollywood landscape
and Gursky for German and international landscapes and
sites. Landmark Pictures examines how each artist has
reconfigured the traditional understanding of landscape by
creating highly seductive, richly associative images that
evoke landmarks that are at once foreign and familiar to
viewers.
Neither Ruscha nor Gursky focuses on set-up photography,
instead reinforcing the experience of a particular site by
applying abstract effects from painting and commercial
imagery, investing the familiar, often overlooked details of
places we visit daily with acute significance. Ruscha and
Gursky are also linked by the degree of distance they each
maintain from their subjects. By focusing the viewers’
attention deliberately on overall design elements rather than
the subjects themselves, the seemingly simple imagery of
their works is revealed as highly complex.
A comparison of the work of the two artists is furthered by
their individual connections to the German photographers
Bernd and Hilla Becher, with whom Gursky studied and who
were early proponents of Ruscha’s work. The Bechers are
renowned for their pioneering photography as well as their
tremendous influence as teachers at the Dusseldorf Art
Academy. The Bechers’ work – comprehensive photographic
records of industrial buildings such as water towers and gas
tanks – countered the prevailing expressionism and angst of
much postwar European art. As teachers, they were
impressed by an American achievement they felt had been
lost in Europe after the war: the ability to transfer everyday
images to the realm of myth. They saw this in Ruscha’s work
and used his books in their teaching, focusing on the irony
and subjectivity that marks Ruscha’s idiosyncratic
documentary sensibility. Gursky builds upon a similar
sensibility in his work by elevating the everyday images that
are his subjects through an exacting focus on their inherent
design elements. This focus takes his subjects out of their
natural context and imbues them with grander, almost epic,
characteristics.
Part I of Landmark Pictures: Ed Ruscha and Andreas Gursky
features Ruscha's 1963 painting, Standard Station, Amarillo,
Texas, as well as many of the artist’s books from the 1960s,
including recent edition photographs based on his 1967
book, 34 Parking Lots in Los Angeles. His new painting
Highland, Franklin, Yucca and two works from his Metro Plots
series are also included. These works are installed with five
photographs by Gursky, dating from 1989 to 1994. Part I also
features several edition photographs by the Bechers from the
Busch-Reisinger Museum's collection. Part II of the exhibition
will feature a number of recent photographs by Gursky,
including his dramatic panorama Los Angeles, along with
several other works by Ruscha from the mid-1990's, such as
pieces from his Cityscape series as well as several prints
and drawings.
The ways in which photography and painting inform each
other is a topic of great interest to many artists right now and
Gursky is one of the most celebrated contemporary
painter-photographers. Gursky’s virtuosity as a
photographer masks the conceptual complexity of his
pictures: his photographs are painterly precisely because
everything transpires on the surface, added exhibition
curator Linda Norden, Barbara Lee Associate Curator of
Contemporary Art, Fogg Art Museum. Ruscha, who used
photography to rethink painting when painting meant
Abstract Expressionism, was also among the first to
recognize that surface can be as telling as depth. Looking at
Gursky's works next to Ruscha's allows us to see just how
much photographic and painterly have evolved over the last
four decades.
HARVARD UNIVERSITY ART MUSEUMS
Cambridge, MA
USA United States of America