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EDWARD RUSCHA (b. 1937) PEACH signed and dated "E. Ruscha '64" lower right oil on canvas 30 x 29 ...

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EDWARD RUSCHA (b. 1937) PEACH signed and dated E. Ruscha '64 lower right oil on canvas 30 x 29 ...
EDWARD RUSCHA
(b. 1937)
PEACH
signed and dated
"E. Ruscha '64" lower right
oil on canvas
30 x 29 in. (76.2 x 73.7 cm)
painted in 1964 <p>PROVENANCE
Acquired directly from the artist
Private collection, United states
For the last four decades, Edward Ruscha has committed himself to developing a unique and simultaneously diverse artistic style. His canvases, prints, and works on paper are a hybrid of Minimalism, Dadaism, and Pop, each served with a dose of conceptual humor. At the very moment one feels they can summarize his latest group of works, he brings something new to the forefront; something unexpected yet entirely his own.
Rucha's interest in typography and printing came at an early age in his hometown of Omaha, Nebraska. These interests were further nurtured at the Chouinard Art Institute in Los Angeles, where he moved following his 1956 high school graduation. It was at Chouinard (now CalArts) where Ruscha trained as a commercial artist and received the inspiration for works such as PEACH, 1964, a bold example of Ruscha's monosyllabic word paintings from the 1960s which have themselves become a centerpiece in his outstanding oeuvre.
To Ruscha, words have a greater potential than images to relay beauty; this potential comes from the intrinsic fact that each word carries a personal interpretation as an extension of the viewer's individual experience. We see in PEACH, 1964 his desire to eliminate the artist's influence on the viewer's interpretation as completely as possible. The aesthetic qualities of the canvas are streamlined into a simple black and white presentation of the chosen word. For this reason, PEACH, 1964 stands as one of Rucha's simplest and most striking word paintings.
"When I first became attracted to the idea of being an artist, painting was the last method, it was an almost obsolete, archaic form of communication... I felt newspapers, magazines, books, words, to be more meaningful than what some damn oil painter was doing" (Edward Ruscha quoted in J. Karlstrong "Interview with Edward Ruscha" CA Oral History Project, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institute, Washington, DC,
1980-1981).
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