Ed Ruscha: Fifty Years of Painting

LA-based painter Ed Ruscha is currently the subject of a major traveling exhibition, Ed Ruscha: Fifty Years of Painting, at the Moderna Museet in Stockholm until September 2010. The show follows the artist’s remarkable career, charting his debut at the Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles in 1963 and the development of the Chocolate Room at the 1970 Venice Biennale, to the 2005 series Course of Empire, created for the 51st Venice Biennale, which re-visits his 1992 Blue Collar series. Works on display also include later photographic works such as Then & Now (2005), which bring his radical oeuvre to new generations.

As the exhibition demonstrates, Ruscha’s most iconic paintings are ambiguous and provocative. Centered primarily on LA and the mid-West, he recycles scraps from popular culture and redefines established genres. The ostensibly commonplace subject matter, as though taken from an advertising campaign or shot from the driver’s seat, is inserted into new contexts: early portraits of words, absurdly realistic paintings of mountain ranges and petrol stations, and, later, more monumental works where complete sentences are contrasted against a dreamlike background.

Over the past half-century, Ruscha’s art has evolved in unpredictable ways, but at the same time the elements that first fired his imagination - cinema and film, driving, roadside signs, the flat, featureless landscapes of the American West, the city filled with constant visual noise and the pleasures of typography - remain the basis for his art. His method of rummaging through our culture for material makes his work an incisive and ever-morphing portrayal of LA and, in a broader sense, of our time.