Lisa Turvey

This title is edited by Robert Dean and Lisa Turney with an essay by Hal Foster, "Evening in America", which analyzes Ruscha's paintings of the 1990s. The period covered by Volume 5 comprises 195 paintings, reproduced in full color. A highlight is the complete layout of the 1995 Denver Central Library project, which Ruscha described as a rolling historical landscape of Colorado and the West. Other notable series of this period include the Cityscape paintings, which resemble ransom notes, and a group of images of clock faces titled after the names of American cars and car manufacturers. This volume also includes numerous documentary photographs, a selection of Ruscha's sketchbook pages, and complete bibliographic references and exhibition histories.

Not every artist is suited to catalogue raisonne treatment, but the oeuvre of Ed Ruscha, comprised as it is of series, repetitions and documentations, looks great under such clerical scrutiny. Projected as a seven-volume edition under the guidance of Robert Dean and Lisa Turvey, the Ruscha Catalogue Raisonne Project lends the serial quality of Ruscha's early artist's books to the entire body of his work, while providing a definitive resource for fans, scholars and collectors in the most efficient style possible. The three previous volumes collected works from 1958-1970, 1971-1982 and 1983-1987. Such esteemed artists and critics as Walter Hopps, Lawrence Weiner, Dave Hickey, Peter Wollen and Yves-Alain Bois have contributed essays celebrating and reviewing Ruscha's steadily incremental accomplishment. Each volume of the catalogue has a stitched binding and a cloth cover with silver-colored embossing, protected with an embossed slipcase. Volume 4 is a co-publication of Gagosian Gallery and Steidl and documents 198 paintings from 1988 to 1992. In addition to almost 200 color reproductions, it includes a comprehensive exhibition history, bibliography and biographical chronology, as well as a text by artist Mel Bochner and an essay by art historian Briony Fer.