Ed Ruscha: Biography & Artwork

Ed
Ruscha

Bold, direct and visually striking, Pop Artist Ed Ruscha’s work blurs the boundaries of 'high-art' with bold text, slogans and imagery that's heavily inspired by American landscapes and motifs. We offer free and confidential valuations and market advice on any Ruscha print, with zero obligation to sell. If you're looking to buy or sell original prints and editions, browse the artist's portfolio and enquire today.

Biography

Combining text, colour, and image to unique effect, Ed Ruscha’s artworks often engage with the American landscape. Saturated with the ironies of US consumer culture, the artist’s work recreates a variety of bold, hard-edged, and resolutely ‘all American’ iconographies, repurposing them as a means for social comment.

Born in Omaha, Nebraska, in America’s mid-West, Ruscha showed an interest in art from an early age, collecting stamps and coins for their bold, graphic composition.

At 18, Ruscha and a friend embarked on a road trip, eventually ending up in Los Angeles. Establishing himself in the Californian city, Ruscha enrolled at Chouinard Art Institute, where he studied under American installation artist Robert W. Irwin, and Abstract Expressionist painter, Emerson Woelffer. Upon graduation, Ruscha started work as a layout artist in the art department of a Los Angeles advertising agency.

A rare exception in art history, Ruscha’s early works were very well received and allowed the artist’s career to take off rapidly. In 1962, a number of Ruscha’s text-based works, which drew heavily from his background in advertising, were chosen by collector Walter Hopps for the ‘New Painting Of Common Objects’ exhibition at California’s Pasadena Art Museum. At the exhibition, Ruscha displayed works like his OOF (1962) alongside those of Roy Lichtenstein and Andy Warhol and became the youngest artist to be associated with the nascent Pop Art scene. This exhibition cemented Ruscha’s status as one of America’s most ground-breaking artists.

In 1963, Ruscha created his beloved artist book, Twentysix Gasoline Stations. Having moved to Los Angeles, Ruscha would often visit his parents in his native Oklahoma City, making the almost 1,400-mile-long journey alone in his car. Along the way, the service stations that punctuated Ruscha’s journey stood out to him for their minimal, streamlined architecture. The geometric apartment buildings of Los Angeles were next to catch Ruscha’s attention. In 1965, he published a collection of photographs depicting these blocky architectural forms, entitled Some Los Angeles Apartments.

Fascinated with the reproducibility of prefabricated American architecture, Ruscha began to paint some of his photographs. He went on to produce works such as the perspective-bending Standard Station (1966), which has since become a widely recognised symbol of contemporary American visual culture and the ultimate Ed Ruscha artwork. Since then, Ruscha reworked and reproduced many times that particular gas station, located on the outskirts of Amarillo, Texas, as in his 1969 screen print, Double Standard.

During his time at the Chouinard art school, Ruscha was greatly influenced by the likes of Pop Artist and Neo-Dadaist, Jasper Johns.
Touring Europe with his mother and brother in 1961, shop signs further inspired his work, as in the case of the print Boulangerie (1961), which also bears the hallmarks of Johns’ distinctive visual style and use of colour. Commenting on the work, Ruscha said, ‘‘Well, there I was, traveling in France, and I would see a sign and I would make a painting of it. Metro or Boulangerie, I was like a kid on his first trip to the new world, or the old world.’
The 1963 series, Twentysix Gasoline Stations bears considerable debt to German couple Bernd and Hilla Becher – photographers well-known for their monochrome snapshots of industrial structures, namely water towers, factories, and gas holders Much like Ruscha, the Bechers would often compile their photographic series during long journeys across Europe and North America, ‘collecting’ each image in a fashion that has been likened to that of botanists cataloging flora and fauna.
In 2010, US President Barack Obama presented British prime minister David Cameron with a lithograph print by Ruscha. Entitled Column With Speed Lines (2003), the print, which features a Doric column, is covered with small lines of blue, white, and red colour, reminiscent of German artist Gerhard Richter's practice of 'blurring' paintings. The print was apparently chosen because of these colours, which feature on the flags of both the United Kingdom and the United States.

In November of 2019, Hurting The Word Radio No. 2 (1964) became the most expensive work of art by ex-commercial artist and foremost proponent of the American Pop Art movement, Ed Ruscha (pronounced roo-shay).

It realised an astonishing US$52.4 million at Christie’s New York, an early example of Rusha’s text-based paintings, the record-breaking piece sets the word ‘RADIO’ against a bright blue background. Despite its concern with bold, simple text, the piece’s rendering of this word is far from simple; ‘hurting’ it with a pair of vices, Ruscha constricts and twists the text, providing his own unique take on the visually arresting iconographies of American consumer capitalism in the process.