Born in 1937 in Omaha, Nebraska, Edward Ruscha was raised in Oklahoma City. In 1956 he moved to Los Angeles to attend the Chouinard Art Institute. By the early 1960s he was well known for his paintings,collages, and photographs, and for his association with the Ferus Gallery group.
Since 1964, Ruscha has been experimenting with painting and drawing words and phrases, often oddly comic and satirical sayings. In his drawings, prints, and paintings, Ruscha doesn't stop experimenting with a range of materials including gunpowder, blood, fruit and vegetable juices, axle grease, and grass stains. and also produced his word paintings with food products on moiré and silks.
Ruscha has consistently combined the cityscape of his adopted hometown with vernacular language to communicate a particular urban experience. Encompassing painting, drawing, photography, and artist's books, Ruscha's work holds the mirror up to the banality of urban life and gives order to the barrage of mass media-fed images and information that confronts us daily. Ruscha's early career as a graphic artist continues to strongly influence his aesthetic and thematic approach.
Ruscha has been the subject of numerous museum retrospectives that have traveled internationally and a major retrospective was organized in the Hayward Gallery in London in 2009.
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