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Ed Ruscha

From:     09
Category: Exhibitions
Date:     29 October 2009
Time:     02:06 AM

Review:

I cannot think of a worst big exhibition in London in the last many years. I knew he was a bad
painter, but the exhibition shows how bad it was in the begining, and clearly shows why it was bad,
and then shows how it continued to be bad even when he got assisstants to paint them, and you even
see that he is bad because he cannot really look at the world very much. And he has very bad ideas
for paintings and goes until the end and makes them, and not only that, but gets somebody important
to buy them and show them everywhere. Not being able to look at the world is a deficiency that
wouldn't normally allow you to become a painter. This show is amazing to explain market bubbles too.
You can see the sixties, you can see a flourishing of bad paintings in the eighties and the zeros.
Amazing. Go see it and marvel. Two paintings perhaps I would save: The mural mexican mural
transferred onto canvas as in "before and after", a more abstract painting strangely hidden from the
normality of the exhibition, and perhaps the church painting in the black and white "pioneers"
painting group. It could be by somebocy else. Ruscha is the proof that in the 60's in the USA anyone
could be a painter. 
   


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