Born in Omaha, Nebraska in 1937, Ed Ruscha moved west to Los Angeles in 1956, where he intended to become a commercial artist. He attended the Chouinard Art Institute and practiced as a graphic designer, but expanded his output to include paintings, drawings, and artist books that explore the banality of landscape, urban and beyond. Deadpan, documentary-style photography found in Royal Road Test (1967) or Every Building on the Sunset Strip (1966) are linked to the New Topographics photography of the commonplace by Joe Deal, Lewis Baltz, and others.
A love of typography and language pervades his work, with sometimes banal commentary—sometimes clichés, sometimes drawn from ubiquitous signage. “IF” sits here on a precipice, a corona-glow of blue heat rising on the horizon, the letters assuming the over-exposed back-lighting of sunset—a one-to-one representation of the word itself.
In January 1963, Ruscha had first of three solo exhibitions at the Ferus Gallery, Los Angeles. Important solo shows have been held at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London (1976); Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (1988); Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (1990); and J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles (1998), and the artist has been the subject of numerous retrospectives, including at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2004); Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2004–05); and National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. (2005). In 2004, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, organized a major retrospective that subsequently traveled to the Museo nazionale delle arti del XXI Secolo, Rome (2004), and the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh (2004–05). Ruscha represented the United States at the 2005 Venice Biennial. Ed Ruscha lives and works in Los Angeles.