Ed Ruscha, born in Omaha in 1937, has spent over six decades charting the strange poetry of modern American life. Emerging in the early 1960s, his work sits somewhere between Pop and Conceptual Art – cool, sharp, and deceptively simple. Trained as a graphic designer at the Chouinard Art Institute (now CalArts), Ruscha brings a precise, typographic clarity to everything he touches, whether painting, printmaking, photography or film. Words are Ruscha’s raw material. Set against vast skies, empty streets, or bleached-out backdrops, they feel both familiar and surreal. His wry, deadpan tone owes something to the Beat writers, but his eye is unmistakably his own: focused on the landscape of Los Angeles, with its sprawl, its surfaces, and its glamour. Fearlessly subversive and endlessly inventive, Ruscha has become one of the most influential American artists of the post-war era.
Since his first solo show at Ferus Gallery in 1963, Ruscha’s work has been exhibited in major institutions worldwide, including at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco; Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney; Pompidou Centre, Paris; and the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid. Ruscha’s art resides in collections including the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York; Tate, London; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington D.C.; and the National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.