Ed Ruscha
"I Don't Want No Retrospective" - so read the words on one of Ed Ruscha's iconic paintings - words that, with an exquisite sense of irony, would be used as the title of his SFMoMA retrospective in 1982. Born in 1937 in Omaha, Nebraska, Ruscha was drawn to the visual arts from an early age. Interest in cartooning was followed by training in the graphic arts and work as an advertising layout artist. Under the influence of artists such as Jasper Johns, Arthur Dove, and Robert Rauschenberg, Ruscha's own work began to shift in a painterly direction, participating with fellow artists Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein in the groundbreaking 1962 show "New Painting of Common Objects." The show gave birth to the Pop Art movement. Ruscha's paintings and drawings began to explore the possibilities for words or phrases as the sole elements on backgrounds of varying pictorial complexity. In the late sixties and early seventies, he also began to experiment with the possibilities of using nontraditional materials, such as food and axle grease, as substitutes for paint in his work. Ruscha's work on word and stain paintings continued into the eighties, when both themes were augmented by explorations into the projection of light in the pictorial space. Recent retrospectives have brought the work of Ruscha to new audiences, but he is far from receding into the staid twilight of a museum piece. In 2005, Ruscha was the representative of the USA at the Venice Biennale, with a new set of paintings, Course of Empire. The works capture the contemporary American urban landscape, in response to both nineteenth-century artist Thomas Cole's painting cycle of the same name, as well as Ruscha's own work from the nineties.
