UNTITLED (CLIBURN COMPETITION) BY ED RUSCHA
Untitled (Cliburn Competition) by Ed Ruscha, 2011.
fourteenth competition
ARTWORK OF THE FOURTEENTH COMPETITION
Untitled (Cliburn Competition), the official artwork of the Fourteenth Competition, captures the essence of the Cliburn in a unique color photograph. Commissioned from renowned American artist Ed Ruscha, the image highlights the profound lines and shapes inherent in the piano, and the manner in which they play off one another to create a cohesive, powerful composition. The dramatic foreshortening recalls the distance a pianist’s fingers travel as they play, taking both performer and audience on a musical journey. Reflecting the artist’s belief that “making art is like an involuntary reflex,” Mr. Ruscha’s image depicts the keyboard as a seemingly limitless landscape of interpretive and creative possibility. Michael Auping, chief curator at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, was pivotal in arranging this commission. He comments: “Ruscha has always approached his subjects, particularly architecture and landscape, from unique angles, exaggerating them to appear grand in an abstract and modern way. The Cliburn work is a classic image. 82
It translates piano keys into a sweeping abstract landscape that pulls us across its surface.” Indeed, this austere yet compelling photograph engages the eye and the mind, as it invokes the excitement, artistry, and camaraderie that have come to define the Cliburn. ABOUT THE ARTIST Edward Ruscha was born in Omaha, Nebraska, in 1937, and grew up in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. In 1956, he moved to Los Angeles to attend the Chouinard Art Institute, and had his first solo exhibition at the Ferus Gallery in 1963. Ten years later, he began showing his work with the Leo Castelli Gallery in New York City. Mr. Ruscha has consistently combined the Los Angeles cityscape with vernacular language to communicate a particular urban experience. Encompassing a variety of media, including drawing, painting, photography, and artists’ books, his works
hold up a mirror to the banality of urban life, while giving order to the barrage of media-fed images that confront us daily. Mr. Ruscha’s early career as a graphic artist continues to influence his aesthetic and thematic approach. Mr. Ruscha has been the subject of numerous museum retrospectives, including those by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Centre Georges Pompidou, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney. In 2004, the Whitney Museum of American Art organized two simultaneous exhibitions: Ed Ruscha and Photography, and Cotton Puffs, Q-tips, Smoke and Mirrors: the Drawings of Ed Ruscha, which traveled to the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. In 2005, Mr. Ruscha represented the United States at the 51st Venice Biennale. The retrospective titled Ed Ruscha: Fifty Years of Painting, opened at London’s Hayward Gallery in 2009 and traveled to the Haus der Kunst in Munich and the Moderna Museet in Stockholm. Ed Ruscha: Road Tested, a major exhibition of his work, was presented at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth in 2011. His extensive bibliography includes Leave Any Information at the Signal, a volume of his writings and interviews, and Richard Marshall’s Ed Ruscha, the first comprehensive monograph about the artist. In 2001, Mr. Ruscha was appointed to the American Academy of Arts and Letters as a member of the Department of Arts. Ed Ruscha continues to live and work in Los Angeles, where he is represented by the Gagosian Gallery. For more information, visit www.edruscha.com.