Ed Ruscha — Bow-Tie Landscapes For Sale

Ed Ruscha's Bow-Tie Landscapes is a 2003 series of four pigmented inkjet prints published by Universal Limited Art Editions (ULAE), the Long Island print workshop founded in 1957. The series comprises Bow-Tie Palm Springs, Bow-Tie Rivet, Bow-Tie Screwhead and Bow-Tie Teardrop, each issued in an edition of 35 plus artist's proofs on Somerset Velvet 280 lb paper.

Each print is built from a mirrored photographic view of California desert outcroppings, the landscape doubled along a central seam to form a symmetrical backdrop. Superimposed on that terrain are twin, inward-pointing silhouette shapes drawn from everyday hardware — a bow tie, a rivet head, a screw head, a teardrop — rendered as pale positive forms against the landscape's darker negative space, giving each composition the uncanny, ambiguous quality of a Rorschach blot: a fastener or clasp, blown up to monumental scale, hovering over scrubland and rock.

The series extends a preoccupation that runs through much of Ruscha's later work: the collision between the vernacular language of manufacturing and hardware — the tools, parts and components he had already catalogued in series such as Archi-Props — and the mythic, wide-open scenery of the American Southwest that has anchored his practice since the early 1960s. Where his celebrated word paintings placed language directly onto landscape, Bow-Tie Landscapes removes text altogether, letting a purely graphic, quasi-mechanical shape carry the same tension between the built environment and the natural one.

Bow-Tie Palm Springs, the largest sheet at 21 1/2 x 43 inches, anchors the group's title with its reference to the desert resort town, while the other three prints share a smaller 17 1/2 x 29 inch format. Together, the four works reflect ULAE's long history of close collaboration with leading American artists and Ruscha's sustained engagement with printmaking into the new century.