Ed Ruscha

Ed Ruscha (*1937) is one of the most eminent and influential postwar American artists and a pioneer of Pop and conceptual Art. At the core of his iconic oeuvre including painting and drawing, photography, film and artist’s books, is the combination of text and image. The California-based artist’s work takes playful aim at visual and linguistic clichés of popular culture, dismantling our accustomed ways of seeing to reveal flashes of beauty and sublimity in the seemingly banal. Ruscha’s painterly oeuvre derives from a perpetual expansion of the medium’s boundaries, often with recourse to visual strategies from advertising, graphic design and film. Early paintings from the first half of the 1960s show the artist breaking with Abstract Expressionism’s dogma of subjectivity to foreground ubiquitous brand logos or product packaging instead. Emphatically horizontal works including Large Trademark with Eight Spotlights (1962)—a monumental, deeply elongated rendering of the Twentieth-Century Fox logo—explore notions of landscape and the American West and recall widescreen CinemaScope film projections. But the hallmark of his painting practice would soon be the incorporation of words and lettering, often in isolation against monochrome or graded color backgrounds. Works including OOF (1962) or Hollywood (1968) document shifts in the semiotic topography of their time and its cacophonous linguistic repertoire. Ruscha’s jarring use of text severed from its everyday context goes beyond reinventing the picture plane as a place for juxtaposing imagery and language. The conceptual space he creates also frees words from their overdetermined use in the media and everyday life, leaving them open to new associations in the mind of the viewer.