Ed Ruscha

Ed Ruscha – Early interest in comics; combination of word and picture

Ed Ruscha was born on 16 December 1937 in Omaha and spent the majority of his childhood and youth in Oklahoma, to where his family moved in 1941. He was already drawing his own comic strips at the age of ten and soon decided to become an artist: with this in mind, he moved to Los Angeles in 1956 to attend the Chouinard Art Institute, and also studied at a school for Disney illustrators. His early pictures created at the art school displayed a close proximity to the works of Franz Kline and Willem de Kooning. Aside of the academic institutions, Ed Ruscha came into contact with Abstract Expressionism which strongly influenced his creativity at the start of his career and his self-understanding as an abstract artist. Ruscha’s interpretation of Expressionism was highly individual: the witty and humorous use of various media such as blood, gunpowder and vegetable juices, and above all the always original use of text would become characteristic of Ed Ruscha’s work. 

Numerous photo books; important representative of Pop Art

Ed Ruscha held his first solo exhibition in the Ferus Gallery of the respected curator Walter Hopps in 1963 and published his first photo book that same year, limited to 400 numbered self-published copies from the Twentysix Gasoline Station. Numerous further publications followed in the following years. The city of Los Angeles was a considerable source of inspiration for Ed Ruscha, who often approached urban everyday life and its immanent myths with irony. He has been considered an important representative of Pop Art since the 1960s with his collages and text arrangements, and his still is unmistakable to this day with a high recognition value. In the 1980s, he reached a mystical-abstract level in which he frequently used astronomical elements such as celestial bodies, star constellations and light rays. 

Role model for international photo artists; brisk exhibition activity

Ed Ruscha has influenced numerous artists after him, and his individual pictorial language is considered a role model for photographers such as Walker Evans and Bernd and Hilla Becher. He married his wife Danna Knege, with whom he had two children, twice: in 1962, and again in 1987 following a temporary divorce. Ed Ruscha has received prizes and awards for his art from all over the world, including the Culture Prize of the German Society for Photography, awarded to him in 2006 in Cologne. Rusche has also taken part in numerous prestigious exhibitions: the Biennale in São Paolo, Paris and Venice, and Documenta in Kassel four times. He held his first retrospective in 2004 in the Whitney Museum for American Art.

Ed Ruscha lives and works primarily in Los Angeles.