it's 10 feet wider, and was featured in the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 2023-24.
Ruscha, who was born in Oklahoma, first saw Standard Oil gas stations during a 1962 road trip to Los Angeles along Route 66, according to Christie’s.
He was enthralled by the contrast of the bold design set against the vast landscape of the Western United States, and his six gas station paintings have become some of his best known.
The gasoline station is Ruscha's most iconic image. He began experimenting with the subject in his first artist's book, Twentysix Gasoline Stations (1963), which reproduces a series of banal photographs the artist took while driving on Route 66 between Los Angeles and his hometown of Oklahoma City.
That year, converting an otherwise ordinary locale into a dramatic, even mysterious symbol of the American vernacular landscape, Ruscha created a monumental painting titled Standard Station, Amarillo, Texas, based on one of the photographs but with a radically foreshortened composition.
A few years later he made this print, further exploring the nuances of his emblematic image. Using the medium of screenprint, Ruscha was able to achieve areas of solid, flat color, as well as sinuously blended colors made with the "split fountain" technique, one of the first fine-art applications of this commercial process that combines differently colored inks. Reusing the screens from the print, Ruscha continued to experiment with Standard Station, and eventually varied colors and compositions to create three additional printed versions.
Several have come to market in the past few years, including Burning Standard (1968), which sold for $22.2m with fees at Christie’s New York in 2023.
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