Sin by Ed Ruscha is a still life with a title that changes what you are looking at. Against a soft grey-black ground, three white geometric forms stand in the left-centre of the composition — a rolled cylinder and two angular planes, the letters S, I, N rendered as three-dimensional objects casting shadows, the word made physical. To the lower right, separated from the letters by a significant distance, sits a single pimento-stuffed olive in full colour — green and glossy, the red centre catching light — the only colour in an otherwise monochromatic image.

The olive is doing the work that a still life always asks its objects to do: carrying meaning beyond their physical presence. In the Catholic tradition in which Ruscha was raised in Oklahoma, sin and temptation are inseparable — the doctrine requires both the transgression and the thing that provoked it. The olive, plump and appetising, sits at a distance from the word that names the condition it might produce, the gap between them the space where the viewer's interpretation lives. Ruscha does not illustrate the relationship; he arranges the elements and steps back.

The three-dimensional rendering of the letters is the work's formal distinction from his other word works of the period. Where Evil and Stranger present their words as flat typography, Sin makes the letters into objects — things that exist in the same physical space as the olive, casting the same shadows, subject to the same light. SIN is not a label applied to the image; it is an object within it, as present and as concrete as the olive beside it. The moral weight of the word and the physical weight of the object are treated as equivalent, both rendered with the same careful, neutral attention.

Produced as a lithograph in 1969 in an edition of twenty, it is among the most formally inventive of Ruscha's early morally charged works — a print that earns its title through composition.

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