The magic of Ed Ruscha’s work is its accessibility. A would-be graphic designer who elevated street signs and banal architecture to collectable art, he presented modern 20th-century America as a visual feast – a mesmerising celebration of colour, texture and shape.
Ed Ruscha / Now Then, an exhaustive survey of the artist’s 65 years in the business, launched last autumn at MoMA in New York, but Los Angeles, his home base since the 1950s, is where it belongs.
Opening 7 April 2024 at LACMA, on Wilshire Boulevard, the exhibition highlights Ruscha’s talent for coaxing the exquisite from whatever lay in his path. Often, the message is in the subject matter, like a service station in Amarillo, Texas, given a monumental physicality with the artist’s singular perspective. Occasionally, the medium itself does the talking. Highlights of Now Then include tobacco paintings conceived during an oil-on-canvas fatigue and a suite of paperworks on which Ruscha made unsightly stains with various substances.
Ed Ruscha, Actual Size, 1962.
Image courtesy Museum Associates/LACMA
Edward Ruscha, Noise, Pencil, Broken Pencil, Cheap Western, 1963. Image: Virginia Museum of Fine Arts
Ed Ruscha, Annie, Poured from Maple Syrup, 1966
Image: Norton Simon Museum, Gift of the Men’s Committee.
Ed Ruscha, OOF, 1962 – 1963.
Photography: Denis Doorly. Courtesy The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Artwork copyright © Edward Ruscha.
Installation view of Ed Ruscha/Now Then at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Photography: Jonathan Dorado / The Museum of Modern Art New York
Installation view of Ed Ruscha/Now Then at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Photography: Jonathan Dorado / The Museum of Modern Art New York
Installation view of the ‘Chocolate Room’, part of Ed Ruscha/Now Then at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Photography: Jonathan Dorado / The Museum of Modern Art New York
At LACMA, he recreates in situ his Chocolate Room, possibly the pinnacle of his experimental work. Unlike his two-dimensional paintings and photographs, it takes the form of paper shingles, each individually screen-printed with a solution of pure dark chocolate and pinned up in overlapping patterns around a small, windowless space.
Visitors will discover much familiarity in these rooms – not to mention the sweet smell of Belgian chocolate. Yet they’ll also experience a depth of colour, texture and thought that is altogether new and exciting.
Ed Ruscha / Now and Then runs at LACMA through 6 October 2024
