Ed Ruscha

Pop artist Ed Ruscha is a staple of 20th-century American art. He rose to prominence in the early 1960s with his cartoon-inspired paintings like HONK (1962), OOF (1963) and SPAM (1962). At the time, Ruscha frequently made the 1000-mile road trip on Route 66 between his hometown, Oklahoma, and his chosen city, Los Angeles. On these journeys, he created the photographic series Twentysix Gasoline Stations (1963), which remains one of his most well-known works to date. Ruscha also made the series into a book and, throughout his career, has returned to the same pictures again and again – turning them into paintings, drawings and prints, which, along with iconic symbols like the Hollywood sign and 20th Century Fox, serve as documents of American life in all its jaded consumerist glory. 

Over the decades, Ruscha’s work has continually evolved. He spent many years experimenting with unusual (and possibly unhygienic) materials like jelly, caviar, ketchup and hot sauce, and his oeuvre includes a huge range of subject matter – from birds to the musical Annie. In Ruscha’s later paintings, the compositions include more natural landscapes, with his signature punchy, poetic phrases overlaid on sun-soaked beaches and crisp mountainscapes. But no matter what direction his art takes him, Ruscha always comes back to words: “I just happened to paint words like someone else paints flowers.” In many ways, Ruscha is as much a poet as a painter. But he’s certainly not a romantic one. The magic of his work is that he sees things exactly as they are. Ruscha’s art is pure and straightforward – a unique, sharp-edged and perfectly-angled vision of the world.