Made in California (1971) renders its three words in a transparent, honey-coloured liquid against a flat saturated yellow ground — MADE above, IN in the centre, CALIFORNIA across the bottom, the letterforms dripping and pooling, their edges soft and wet. The text is barely there. The substance that forms the letters is close enough in colour to the ground behind them that the inscription approaches invisibility, legible only because of the slight tonal shift and the droplets that gather at the base of each character. California, here, is written in something that might be oil, or honey, or the particular amber light that saturates the state for most of the year.

Ruscha had arrived in California in 1956 from Oklahoma City, nineteen years old, and spent the following fifteen years making the state his primary subject — its petrol stations, its streets, its signs, its swimming pools, its Hollywood sign. By 1971 he had documented California more thoroughly than almost any artist of his generation, and Made in California is, among other things, a self-description: this is what he was, geographically and artistically, a product of the place he had chosen and that had shaped everything he made.

The phrase MADE IN CALIFORNIA borrows the language of product labelling — the country-of-origin stamp on consumer goods — and applies it to a place instead of an object. No product is identified. California itself is the thing that has been made, or that makes things, the label floating free of any specific manufacture. That ambiguity sits at the heart of Ruscha's relationship to the state: California as idea, as image, as cultural product circulated far beyond its geography — a place that had been selling itself as a destination and a lifestyle long before Ruscha arrived to document it with the neutral attention of someone who understood exactly what he was looking at.

Produced as a colour lithograph in 1971 in an edition of one hundred, it is one of the most personally resonant works in his output — a print that asks, with characteristic lightness, what it means to be made somewhere.

For more information or to buy Made in California by Ed Ruscha, contact our specialists using the enquiry button above.

Discover Ed Ruscha art for sale, or speak to our team about selling Ed Ruscha art.