Stranger (1983) by Ed Ruscha scatters its letters down the picture plane in a single vertical descent — S enormous in the upper left, bold white geometric capitals against a dark brown field, then T smaller in the middle distance, then R, A, N, G, E, R diminishing rapidly as they fall toward the lower edge, the final letters nearly invisible against horizontal bands of pale light that suggest mist, water, or the shimmer of a road at night. By the time you reach the R at the bottom, the word has almost ceased to exist.

The typography does the conceptual work entirely. A stranger is, by definition, someone approaching from a distance — or receding into it — and Ruscha has made the word perform exactly that condition. The S arrives with complete authority, the scale of a highway sign or a film title card, demanding attention. The letters that follow it diminish not in the way of a word being read left to right but in the way of a figure moving away, each character smaller than the last, the whole word enacting the experience of encountering something that refuses to come fully into focus. By the time STRANGER has been assembled in the mind, it is already disappearing.

Ruscha grew up on the films of the American West — the stranger arriving in town, the figure on the horizon whose intentions remain unknown — and his Oklahoma roots gave him an outsider's relationship to California that never entirely resolved itself. He arrived in Los Angeles in 1956 and spent the following decades cataloguing a city from the position of someone who understood it precisely because he hadn't grown up inside it. STRANGER, produced in 1983 as a lithograph in an edition of seven, carries that ambiguity without resolving it: threat, visitor, self, or simply a word that has been looked at long enough to become strange.

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

Explore Ed Ruscha paintings for sale, or get in touch about selling an Ed Ruscha work.