About This Artwork
City, 1968
Oil on canvas
139.7 x 121.9 cm (55 x 48 in.)
Twentieth-Century Purchase Fund, 1969.722
From his earliest experiences as a sign painter, Ed Ruscha retained an interest in the visual and conceptual tensions between text and image. By the late 1960s, the artist began using pointed, single words— chosen as much for their evocative power as for their phonetic qualities—as visual subjects in a variety of media. Between 1966 and 1969, Ruscha made a series of “liquid” or “wet” word paintings, in which the linguistic effect is made more palpable by the trompe l’oeil renderings of the words, which suggest that they have been created from water, oil, syrup, or another fluid.