Ed Ruscha Throughout his career, Ed Ruscha has maintained an attachment to the simplicity that characterized Pop Art, while still managing to diversify his body of work. Born in Omaha, Nebraska in 1937, Ruscha moved to Los Angeles to become a commercial artist at the age of 19, where he would stay until the present. In the beginning of his career, Ruscha depicted stereotypically American subjects such as roadside gas stations, showing the influences of Hopper and Hockney. He would gradually introduce words into his art until they eventually became his focus. Many of his paintings and prints of the 1960s featured a single word depicted in unique fashion, often in trompe l' oeil. In the 1970s, Ruscha, along with Barbara Kruger and Jenny Holzer among others, began using entire phrases in his works, a distinctive characteristic of the post-Pop Art generation. Ruscha continues to use language and in his works while focusing on traditionally West Coast subjects. His most recent set of prints were painterly details of Los Angeles street maps. The artist lives and works in LA.
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