Ed Ruscha @ Gagosian Gallery, London - 'Says I, to Myself, Says I' Exhibition

Ed Ruscha

Says I, to Myself, Says I 

Gagosian, London

October 14 – December 19, 2025

Ed Ruscha

New Hey, 2024

Acrylic on linen

20 x 24 inches (50.8 x 61 cm)

© Ed Ruscha

Photo: Jeff McLane

Courtesy Gagosian

Gagosian presents Says I, to Myself, Says I, Ed Ruscha’s first exhibition dedicated to his paintings on unprimed linen. On view at the Davies Street gallery in London, it coincides with Talking Doorways, an exhibition at Gagosian’s rue de Castiglione gallery in Paris.

Ed Ruscha began making paintings on raw linen in the early 1990s, although this body of work has never before been the focus of an exhibition. The ten new works in this format presented in London establish visual and textural contrasts between the painted words and images and their supports, emphasizing their definition and potential. Rendered in a serif typeface and mostly in white, many of the words are underlined with tapering black shapes that accentuate them and suggest horizons and cast shadows within otherwise flat compositions, while some canvases include additional painted passages and symbols.

Ed Ruscha

It's It, 2024

Acrylic on linen

20 x 24 inches (50.8 x 61 cm)

© Ed Ruscha

Photo: Jeff McLane

Courtesy Gagosian

Since the 1960s, Ed Ruscha has consistently foregrounded the strangeness of everyday language, exploring how the relationships between words and images transform the meanings of each. It’s It (2024) suggests an attempt to clarify the identity of something, though the lack of antecedents renders the doubled pronoun somewhat cryptic. It’s It also incorporates the naturalistic image of a wooden plank stretched across the top of the composition—the defining element of the artist’s Tom Sawyer paintings from 2022.

Ed Ruscha

And What Not, 2023

Acrylic on linen

24 x 20 inches (61 x 50.8 cm)

© Ed Ruscha

Photo: Jeff McLane

Courtesy GagosianEd Ruscha

Other works picture a mountain peak—among Ed Ruscha’s most iconic motifs—in a juxtaposition of archetypal landscape imagery with signifying language. Instead of using the snowy range as a backdrop to text as he did in his Mountain series (1997–), Ed Ruscha here positions it as a graphic and painterly element, replacing abstract shapes in these paintings.

Ed Ruscha

Says I, to Myself Says I, 2024

Acrylic on linen

20 x 24 inches (50.8 x 61 cm)

© Ed Ruscha

Photo: Jeff McLane

Courtesy Gagosian

Says I, to Myself Says I (2024) places its text at a diagonal, the words’ dynamism emphasized by the geometric shapes that extend from the lines to the right. An intriguing example of vernacular language, the phrase can be found in Irish and American folk songs and colloquial sayings, while the repetition of “Says I” suggests an introspective declaration.

Gagosian will publish a catalogue on Ruscha’s new work to accompany the exhibition.

Ed Ruscha

Says I, to Myself, Says I, 2025, installation view

Artwork © Ed Ruscha

Photo: Prudence Cuming Associates Ltd

Courtesy Gagosian

GAGOSIAN, LONDON

17–19 Davies Street, London W1K 3DE

gagosian.com

Fiona Rae @ Buchmann Galerie, Berlin - Row Paintings

Fiona Rae: Row Paintings

Buchmann Galerie, Berlin

5 November — 18 December 2021

Fiona Rae

Untitled (six on grey 1), 1990

Oil on canvas, 213,4 x 198,1 cm / 84 x 78 in

© Fiona Rae, Courtesy Buchmann Galerie

Buchmann Galerie presents an exhibition from the series ‘Row Paintings’ by British artist FIONA RAE.

The ‘Row Paintings’ were created in the late 1980s, a time when painting was seen by many as outmoded and irrelevant. Challenged by this climate to find a way to recontextualise and thereby reinvigorate the possibilities of painting, Fiona Rae began her pioneering engagement with the medium and formed her own visual language.

The ‘Row Paintings’ provide a first glimpse of the conceptual framework that the artist has maintained and developed further since that time in more than fifteen sometimes extensive and diverse groups of works. Fiona Rae’s improvisations – painted directly on the canvas within self-determined parameters – employ a visual language that shows recurring painterly as well as semiotic conventions.

Looking at the canvases of the ‘Row Paintings’, one might note the calligraphic and painterly gestures arranged in rows, exuberant forms reminiscent of pictograms or an alphabet of painting. The artist speaks of “characters”, almost figurative elements that follow a precise yet free choreography on the stage of the canvas. It is with these means that Fiona Rae explores painting from the axis of both high and popular culture, making use of diverse references such as Abstract Expressionism, Philip Guston’s late work and the surreal comic strips of George Herriman.

Compositionally, the ‘Row Paintings’ are strictly structured, the pictorial material organised in rows, similar to a notation. This order also gives the series its title. However, the supposed rigidity, the conceptual framework, is repeatedly torn apart and negated by the gestural inserts. Splashes of colour and gradients disturb the strict design and demand their own space. The tension and suspense that the paintings create is strongly determined by this fruitful conflict: to conjure up a painterly vocabulary and grammar in order to subvert and light-handedly transform them using the same means.

In the catalogue accompanying the exhibition, the American art theorist and critic Terry R. Myers writes of Fiona Rae’s paintings existing in the “perpetual present […] without strain or surrender.” The presence of the works does indeed seem effortless, and – when one considers the myriad references hidden in this seemingly abstract painting – visually rich.

The contemporary relevance of the ‘Row Paintings’ is also evident in the current exhibition Explorations in Paint at the Royal Academy of Arts in London. There, the work Untitled (six on brown), 1989, is set in dialogue with other historical works from the collection.

Works from the ‘Row Paintings’ series were first shown in the 1988 exhibition Freeze in London’s Docklands. It put Fiona Rae on the map as an early member of the group which became known as the Young British Artists (YBAs), who would revolutionise the British art world and beyond. Works by the artist are represented in numerous public collections, including the Tate Collection UK, Centre Pompidou Paris, Hamburger Bahnhof Berlin and the Grand Duke Jean Museum of Modern Art (Mudam) Luxembourg. Fiona Rae was born in Hong Kong in 1963 and lives and works in London.

The catalogue of the exhibition Fiona Rae: Row Paintings, with an essay by Terry R. Myers, is published by DCV Books (German/English, 56 pp.). It can be ordered via Buchmann Galerie or from the publisher. 

BUCHMANN GALERIE

Charlottenstrasse 13, 10969 Berlin

www.buchmanngalerie.com