The innovative, creative work of the US artist Ed Ruscha encompasses more than six decades. His importance as one of the key figures of American post-war art was recognized with the major retrospective “ED RUSCHA/NOW THEN” at the Museum of Modern Art in New York earlier this year. For paintings inspired mainly by the urban landscape of his adopted home, Los Angeles, Ruscha became one of the most influential artists of his generation. Commonplace subjects such as advertising and film decisively shaped his work and established a connection to Pop Art in terms of content and form. At the same time, Ruscha's playful use of letters stands in the tradition of Dada and draws on elements of Conceptual Art. Since 1956, Ruscha has called Los Angeles, the capital of the American film industry, his home. From then on, the city's characteristic visual influences would shape Ruscha's artistic work. As early as 1962, he created his legendary painting “Lage Trademark with Eight Spotlights”, which shows the logo of the the film production company Twentieth Century Studios shining brightly in the dark. Today, the work is part of the Whitney Museum of American Art collection in New York. As is the case with the celebrated 'Hollywood Paintings', which he started to make in the late 1960s, and which also show the legendary Hollywood logo from different perspectives in front of a bright red sky (such as 'Hollywood Study' from 1968, Museum of Modern Art, New York), Ruscha has always been concerned with the depiction of extreme light phenomena, which are characteristic of the film industry's self-conception. Alongside these legendary logos, the practices of filmmaking and screening in movie theaters have repeatedly inspired the artist. In “Miracle #69,” a bright, multifaceted beam of light, like a divine miracle, illuminates the deep black space. The ray of light from the projector that illuminates the movie theater ushers at the moment when reality and fiction collide when the audience is pulled out of their existence and plunged into another world. Like the scenes of the Annunciation in medieval art, the bright beam of light heralds the supernatural and allows it to flash through the darkness of our everyday lives. “Miracle #69” was created in 1975 as part of a series of works with about ten other pastels with related motifs. Today, most of these are in American private collections, and in 2018, one was acquired for the Tate collection, from which it recently featured in the significant Ruscha retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. [JS]