Ed Ruscha

Ed Ruscha’s six-decade career defies easy categorisation. The artist playfully moves between photography, paintings, drawings, text, and collage – occasionally incorporating more unusual materials like blood, gunpowder, or vegetable juice. With this eclectic range of media, Ruscha creates humorous, often deadpan, reflections upon American culture, compounding the colloquial and consumerist to comment upon the myth of American Romanticism.

Ruscha is known for his witty and enigmatic inclusion of text in his work, informed by his training as a commercial graphic designer. For Ruscha, words can function as a form, symbol and material. “I like the idea of a word becoming a picture, almost leaving its body, then coming back and becoming a word again.” 

Born in Omaha, Nebraska, in 1937, Ruscha moved to Los Angeles in 1956 to study commercial art at Chouinard Art Institute. This marked the beginning of Ruscha’s fascination with Californian culture, which has defined his practice since. He has served on the board of trustees for the Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles, and was awarded an Artistic Excellence Award by the Americans for the Arts in 2009. His work has been exhibited globally, with numerous solo exhibitions, including at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, and Moderna Museet, in addition to the Venice Biennale, where he represented the United States in 2005. Ruscha’s works are held in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art in New York; the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C; Tate, London; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; and the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, amongst others. 

He lives and works in Los Angeles, California.