For Sale 17 Acres by Ed Ruscha takes the most transactional phrase in the American landscape and presses it into oxidised metal. FOR above, SALE below, 17 ACRES smaller at the base — all three lines embossed into the Mixografia surface in large blocky capitals, the letters cut into the field like stencilling on a crate or branding on livestock. The ground is deep bronze and rust, the mottled surface suggesting years of exposure, the whole image the colour of the American West after the rains have stopped and the iron in the soil has had time to work.

From the land grants and homestead acts of the nineteenth century through to the suburban expansion of the post-war decades, the transfer of land has been the engine of the country's self-transformation — territory acquired, divided, sold, built on, sold again. 17 ACRES is the detail that gives the work its particular charge. The specificity is real estate logic: not land in general, but this land, measured, bounded, priced. Yet without a location, a contact, or a price, FOR SALE cannot function as an advertisement. It can only function as a statement about what land is in America — a commodity, a unit of transaction, the ground beneath everything.

The Rusty Signs series applied the Mixografia process to the language of American commerce and civic life, rendering familiar phrases in surfaces that suggest age, erosion, and the slow transformation of the manufactured into the geological. The corroded bronze ground here is particularly apt: land outlasts every transaction conducted upon it, and FOR SALE, pressed into a surface that looks like it has been oxidising for decades, carries the weight of all the sales that preceded this one.

For more information or to buy For Sale 17 Acres by Ed Ruscha, contact our specialists using the enquiry button above

Browse Ed Ruscha signed prints for sale, or enquire about selling Ed Ruscha prints.