Ed Ruscha

At the start of his artistic career, Ed Ruscha called himself an “abstract artist . . . who deals with subject matter.” Abandoning academic connotations that came to be associated with Abstract Expressionism, he looked instead to tropes of advertising and brought words—as form, symbol, and material—to the forefront of painting. Working in diverse mediums with humor and wit, he oscillates between sign and substance, locating the sublime in landscapes both natural and artificial.

In 1956, Ruscha moved from Oklahoma City to Los Angeles, where he attended the Chouinard Art Institute. After graduation, Ruscha began to work for ad agencies, honing his skills in schematic design and considering questions of scale, abstraction, and viewpoint, which became integral to his painting and photography. Ruscha’s paintings of the 1960s explore the noise and the fluidity of language. He continues to experiment with form and make use of the American vernacular, reflecting on its evolution as online technologies alter the essence of human communication. 

The first retrospective of Ruscha’s drawings was held in 2004 at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Ruscha represented the United States at the 51st Biennale di Venezia (2005) with Course of Empire, an installation of ten paintings. In 2018 Ruscha’s Course of Empire was presented concurrently with Cole’s at the National Gallery in London. ED RUSCHA / NOW THEN opened at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 2023 and traveled to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 2024. The artist’s first comprehensive retrospective in more than twenty years, it included over 250 works from his more than six-decade career, illuminating both emblematic and lesser-known aspects of a practice that has influenced artists, designers, and writers worldwide.

Source: Gagosian