Ed Ruscha American, b. 1937

Ed Ruscha (b. 1937) has spent seven decades placing words within pictures and finding a deadpan poetry in the ordinary American landscape. Trained in commercial printing and drawn to Dada, he paints single words and short phrases across expanses of empty ground, photographs gasoline stations, parking lots and apartment buildings without apparent inflection, and has made the visual language of Los Angeles a subject in its own right. His photographic books of the 1960s, from Twentysix Gasoline Stations onward, isolate a single subject and present it as a deadpan series without commentary. They belong to the same moment as the industrial typologies of Bernd and Hilla Becher; the two practices came to be understood together as examples of the serial, impersonal photography that would become central to Conceptual art.

Born in Omaha, Nebraska, Ruscha moved to Oklahoma City in 1941 and drove to Los Angeles in 1956 to study at the Chouinard Art Institute, working as a commercial layout artist while developing his painting. His early works placed single words—Boss, Noise, Annie—against flat fields of color. Standard Station of 1963 transformed the filling station into a hard diagonal of pure graphic design, establishing the tension between language, image and the vernacular that would define much of his work.

Ruscha’s artist’s books altered the possibilities of both photography and the book as an art form. Twentysix Gasoline Stations (1963), a sequence of photographs of filling stations along Route 66 between Los Angeles and Oklahoma City presented without commentary, was published in an edition of four hundred and rejected by the Library of Congress as unworthy of copyright deposit. It was the first of sixteen books. Various Small Fires and Milk followed in 1964, Some Los Angeles Apartments in 1965, and Every Building on the Sunset Strip in 1966, a single accordion-fold sheet extending to twenty-five feet. Nine Swimming Pools and a Broken Glass and Royal Road Test followed soon after. These books became foundational works of Conceptual art and of the modern photobook: inexpensive, mechanically reproduced and presented as ordinary printed matter rather than precious art objects. Ruscha has consistently resisted imposing a message upon them, allowing the facts and appearances of things themselves to carry the work.

Ruscha has continued to work across painting, drawing, printmaking and film, employing materials as unlikely as gunpowder, blood and fruit juice. He has also repeatedly photographed the Sunset Strip over more than fifty years, creating an extensive visual record of the city’s transformation, now digitized as an archive. He represented the United States at the Venice Biennale in 2005. In 2023, The Museum of Modern Art presented ED RUSCHA / NOW THEN, a major retrospective that subsequently travelled to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

Ruscha’s work is held in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, Tate, the Centre Pompidou, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Getty Research Institute, among many others.

Bruce Silverstein Gallery has presented Ruscha’s work in In Sequence (2025), Summer Glow (2024) and REWIND (2021).