Ed Ruscha: Fifty Years of Painting
Hayward Gallery, until 10 January 2010
Apparently, Ed Ruscha (born 1937 and pronounced Rew-shay) is widely considered one of the world’s most influential living artists. American, he has been based in Los Angeles all his working life, and is much indebted to the strategies and formal devices of film-making. Reference books tend to call him a Pop artist, in recognition of his interest in popular culture, and his exploitation of branding and presentation. (An early painting features one of those distinctive red boxes of raisins smashed flat to the picture plane.) His admirers want to distance him now from the Pop label and talk about conceptual art and surrealism. Ruscha sees himself as ‘a combination of abstract artist and someone who deals with subject matter’.
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