Curated by Siri Engberg with Fabián Leyva-Barragan

For five decades, Allen Ruppersberg has balanced grand gestures—say, opening a hotel or café under his own name, or transcribing Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray by hand—with humble vernacular materials (Colby Poster Printing Company’s rainbow-gradient placards, pop LPs, laminated plastic, etc.) and self- effacing modesty (“Al”). Like his peers who defined West Coast Conceptualism (John Baldessari, Douglas Huebler, and Alexis Smith among them), Ruppersberg has embraced language as the province of visual art, often with humorous results. So, his first major retrospective in more than thirty years will be rife with words: A novel, a screenplay, piles of books (including the slyly fictional Remainders, 1991), and a mural-scale phonetic remake of Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl” are among the approximately 120 works included. A comprehensive catalogue with essays by the curator, Thomas Crow, Matthew S. Witkovsky, and Aram Moshayedi, plus an illustrated chronology, will give Al’s fans plenty to talk about. Travels to the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, February 10–May 12, 2019. 

— Michael Ned Holte