Ed Ruscha, Los Angeles Apartments, 2013

This is the catalogue for Ed Ruscha’s exhibition Los Angeles Apartments which was held at the Kunstmuseum Basel in 2013. In 1965, Ed Ruscha published Some Los Angeles Apartments, the third of his ongoing series of photographic books, and completed a group of ten related drawings that depict examples of the ubiquitous Southern California apartment building. The exhibition showed the preparatory studies for these drawings which were recently acquired by the Department of Prints and Drawings of the Kunstmuseum Basel. They are based directly on the photographs Ruscha made of the apartment buildings.

Included also, are photographs from Ruscha’s Gasoline Stations series of 1962, one of which served as a model for the painting of Standard Station, Amarillo, Texas of 1963. By immediately juxtaposing preparatory studies, drawings and photographs, Ruscha’s working method is clearly highlighted and the significance of photography for his passage between abstraction and realism made evident.