Ralph Rugoff

Ed Ruscha: Tom Sawyer Paintings documents the 2022 exhibition of ten new paintings and a new hologram at Gagosian Paris. The exhibition brought together naturalistic paintings of simple wooden slats, which at once represent a new direction in Ruscha s work and extend his long-standing interest in realism, modernist abstraction, and the American vernacular. The catalogue includes plate photography of the ten paintings and one hologram as well as installation views of the exhibition. Ed Ruscha was born in 1937 in Omaha, Nebraska and lives and works in Los Angeles. A career-spanning retrospective, ED RUSCHA/NOW THEN, will open at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in September 2023 and travel to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in April 2024. Since 1993, Gagosian has presented twenty-five major exhibitions of Ruscha s work in the United States and Europe. New, illustrated essays by Mark Godfrey and Ralph Rugoff, offering critical and historical contexts for the work, are included in this bilingual English and French catalogue.

Definitive monograph on America's most challenging and influential artist Los-Angeles-based artist Paul McCarthy (b.1945) creates Disneyesque installations, sculptures of animal/vegetable/human hybrids and slapstick performances in a purge of a national subconscious. The psycho-sexual desires and anxieties induced by the media and the built environment of contemporary America emerge in his collisions of plastic prosthetic limbs and condiments that stand in for bodily fluids. These works have been variously deployed: through live actions, often documented on video, and more recently in outsized figures and artificial rural environments, combined in overtly sexual ways. McCarthy's work echoes that of European artists such as Joseph Beuys or the Viennese Aktionistes, but gives 'action art' a postmodern twist. This new revised and expanded edition includes contributions by luminaries such as Kristine Stiles, Ralph Rugoff, Massimiliano Gioni and Robert Storr.

Documenting this American artist's first solo museum exhibition, Charles LeDray will focus on his obsessively crafted miniature sculptures in a variety of media, including textiles, ceramics, seashells, and bone, that reflect on childhood, gender, sexuality, and autobiography.

Circus Americanus is a riotous excursion through America's changing visual landscape. Exploring its remote corners and bizarre byways, Ralph Rugoff takes us on a tour of theme park slums and mystical police cars, futurist war and the "aesthetics of safe chaos." With an idiosyncratic eye for detail, he maps a culture in which "reality" has become just another theme, revealing an America much stranger than the glamorous kitsch of its surfaces. Whether he is writing about Las Vegas casinos, forensic cartoons, the enigma of Napoleon's preserved penis or the aesthetics of sewage treatment, Rugoff considers everyday marvels with a concern for how we live together in a world beyond belief.