Allen Ruppersberg

Allen Ruppersberg remains perhaps the most under-recognized member of a generation of West Coast conceptual-based artists that includes John Baldessari, Bruce Nauman, and Ed Ruscha. From his early-1970s forays in hotel and café management as art—what would come to be known as “relational aesthetics”—to his recent interactive collage installation You and Me or The Art of Give and Take, Ruppersberg’s art has been steeped in all aspects of popular culture, from Hollywood ephemera to record album covers to pinup calendars to forgotten educational movies, all of which he collects with pack-rat intensity. Most notable, though, has been his engagement with books—he once transcribed the entirety of Oscar Wilde’s novel The Picture of Dorian Gray onto a series of twenty large canvases.