Ed Ruscha

Early in his career, Ed Ruscha described himself as “an abstract artist who deals with subject matter,” shifting away from Abstract Expressionism’s academic approach to embrace the visual language of advertising. By placing words at the center of his art, he explored their potential as form, symbol, and material, using humor to examine the space between sign and substance, and finding the sublime in both natural and urban landscapes.

In 1956, Ruscha moved from Oklahoma City to Los Angeles to attend Chouinard Art Institute, where exposure to Jasper Johns’s work prompted him to consider the use of readymade images in abstraction. His first word painting, E.Ruscha(1959), used intentional spacing “errors” to highlight the mechanics of language and image. After graduating, he worked in advertising, refining his design sensibility and interest in scale and perspective, which became central to his art.

Ruscha’s pioneering artist’s books began with Twentysix Gasoline Stations (1963), featuring straightforward photographs taken along Route 66, followed by works like Every Building on the Sunset Strip (1966) and his reimagining of On the Road (2009). His paintings and altered books often engage language’s physical and visual properties, reflecting on how art and information circulate.

Throughout the 1960s, Ruscha explored the immediacy and humor of language, as seen in OOF (1962–63), where the word’s visual impact invites vocalization. Since 1993, he has held twenty-one solo exhibitions with Gagosian, including Custom-Built Intrigue: Drawings 1974–84 (2017). His first retrospective of drawings took place at the Whitney Museum in 2004, and he represented the U.S. at the 2005 Venice Biennale with Course of Empire, a series reflecting on modern progress and its consequences, later shown at the National Gallery in London.

In 2023, the Museum of Modern Art in New York opened ED RUSCHA / NOW THEN, the artist’s first comprehensive retrospective in over two decades, which traveled to LACMA in 2024. Featuring over 250 works, the exhibition showcased the breadth of Ruscha’s influential practice, which continues to engage with the evolving American vernacular in the digital age.