ED RUSCHA

Random phrases become mantras, and simplicity becomes confusing. This is at the heart of Ed Ruscha’s genius: an ability to use typography and paint to elevate words into something considerable. Heavy Industry is inherently vague; painted on a used canvas rotated ninety degrees, where the ghosts of previous words are scarcely visible through thick brown paint, it provides no answers, and asks no direct questions and yet leaves the viewer with an unshakeable sense that something is being said. The industry in question is not explicit, it’s weight is up to us to decide and so Ruscha is able to use the vernacular and tactics of advertising to, by removing the context, force us to focus on linguistics and meaning in a way that explicit commercialism is not able to. Ruscha changed his typeface to suit the words, and here, in heavy, almost gothic, serifed font, the painting seems to inhabit the very phrase it proclaims - every element speaks to ‘Heavy Industry’, while leaving it entirely up to us to decide what that means.

MARK ROTHKO

Having studied under the father of Color-Field painting himself, Josef Albers, Mark Rothko took the genre in new and staggering directions. Applying thin layers of diluted oil paint, painstakingly slowly so as to build up soft hues on the canvas such that the works are almost luminous in their color, Rothko wanted to control the viewer on a carnal level. He removed the intellectualism of Albers and many of the abstract expressionists around him. Instead, he didn’t want the viewer to try and rationalise the work or any feelings it provoked - Rothko tried to find an innate, visceral science to color that when executed in tandem and relation to each other, as seen here, could bring the viewer on a preset journey of emotion. It is for this same reason that almost all of his works were unnamed - any context outside of the experience of viewing them felt unnecessary and could detract from the deeply human experience of hues and shades affecting oneself.

CHARLES G. SHAW

Definitions of the abstract are loose. What is an abstraction to one person is figurative reality to another, and the movement of American Abstraction is loosely defined with each practitioner understanding their role and subject matter differently. For Shaw, his ‘Plastic Polygons', as he called them, were not abstractions of the New York architecture but truthful depictions of concrete objects, and he coined the movement ‘concretionism’. The works are pioneering, and helped lay the foundations for so many artists that followed, but he was painting in a time when abstract art of any sense was not fully accepted by the critical vanguard or the commercial collectors. Soft palette and sharp lines create an atmosphere, but the work is mostly unemotional or expressive - instead, they are an attempt to depict the beauty of a rigorous system through form and color. For years Shaw painted in the series, and with each show and painting he moved the dial slowly to create an environment of acceptance to more radical forms.