Since the 1960s, after graduating from Chouinard Art Institute in Los Angeles, Nebraska-born Ed Ruscha quickly became an iconic American artist known for his enigmatic works featuring glib words and phrases in combination with color field backgrounds and the iconography of place. In addition to his intermedia explorations in photography, artist books, and film, the artist is admired for textual paintings and prints that teasingly withhold meaning and seek tension. These paintings interrogate dichotic relationships between spoken and visual language, sign and referent — slippery interplays presented in deadpan imagery edged with wry humor. After graduating from Chouinard in 1960, Ruscha embarked on a series of images in which the form of the word floats tantalizingly free of its content. This loosening allowed him to plumb words for their expressive foothold in our minds and poetic potential in their graphic and auditory attributes.

Ruscha considers himself an artist inspired by Americana just as much as the cultural climate of Southern California. He is an artist of America’s roadways, both the highways stretching across the country and the freeways and boulevards slithering through Los Angeles, flanked by signs. Familiar vistas and tropes derived from the film industry feature prominently in Ruscha’s work. The mountain in his Mountain Series plays upon the Paramount Pictures logo and white words emblazoned over mountain ranges as in Evolution Revolution (2013) or Fruit-Metrecal Hollywood (1971) recall the Hollywood sign upon Mount Lee. In the mid-80s, Ruscha’s silhouettes gesture to film language, particularly the visuality of film noir. The concoction of lettering like billboards or poster billings and imagery bespoke to Los Angeles compels connection-reaching in kind: anything large scale evokes the cinematic and words recall titles and subtitles.