Ed Ruscha

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Ed Ruscha (Edward Ruscha), 1937–, American artist, b. Omaha, Neb. He is closely associated with Los Angeles, where he moved to attend (1956–60) the Chouinard Art Institute. Cooly inventive and extremely influential, Ruscha uses imagery and language familiar from popular media and typically mingles various styles including pop art , surrealism , photorealism , and conceptual art. He became known for his paintings of roadside buildings (e.g., Standard Station, Amarillo, Texas, 1963) and Southern California icons (e.g., the 20th Century Fox logo and Hollywood sign) executed in a hard-edged commercial style and for his painted words isolated from context and floating in deep space. He also produced a number of books, the earliest a series of affectless photographs of such architectural banalities as gas stations, apartment buildings, and parking lots. An accomplished draftsman and printmaker, he often incorporates food, blood, grease, gunpowder, or other unusual materials in his graphic works. Many of his later images feature archetypal American landscapes overlaid with apparently unrelated words and phrases.

Bibliography: See A. Schwartz, ed., Leave Any Information at the Signal: Writings, Interviews, Bits, Pages (2004); studies by S. Engberg, ed. (1999), N. Benezra et al. (2000), R. D. Marshall (2003), P. Poncy, ed. (2004), M. Rowell (2004), S. Wolf (2004), and A. Schwartz (2010).

Ruscha, Ed (1937– ). American painter, printmaker, designer, and photographer. He was born in Omaha, Nebraska, and studied at the Chouinard Art Institute, Los Angeles, 1956–60. His work has been varied and experimental, often using unconventional materials (such as blood and foodstuffs), but he is best known for his books of deadpan photographs of banal features of American life, which are early examples of Book art. The first was Twentysix Gasoline Stations (1962). To many people, these books are exceedingly boring, but Ruscha's admirers see great depths in them: ‘Mimicking the way in which Americans use their cameras, these collections of snapshot-like pictures question the medium's artistic potential and raise broader issues about our society's strange affair with photography. Ruscha's books are so simple they become profound’ ( George Walsh, Colin Naylor, and Michael Held, eds., Contemporary Photographers, 1982). Some of his more conventional paintings and prints are representative of Pop art, depicting advertising signs in a bold, brash manner (Large Trademark with Eight Spotlights, Whitney Museum, New York, 1962).