MoMA presents a major Ed Ruscha retrospective

From September 10, 2023, through January 13, 2024, the Museum of Modern Art presents “Ed Ruscha / Now Then”, the most comprehensive presentation of Ed Ruscha’s work, and his first solo exhibition at the Museum.

Source: Museum of Modern Art · Image: Ed Ruscha. “Standard Station, Ten-Cent Western Being Torn in Half”. 1964. Oil on canvas, 65 × 121 1/2” (165.1 × 308.6 cm). Private Collection, Fort Worth. © Edward Ruscha, photo © Evie Marie Bishop, courtesy of the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth.

Spanning 65 years of Ed Ruscha’s remarkable career and mirroring his own cross-disciplinary approach, the exhibition features over 250 works, produced from 1958 to the present, in various mediums—including painting, drawing, prints, film, photography, artist’s books, and installation—displayed according to a loose chronology throughout the Museum’s sixthfloor galleries. Alongside the artist’s most acclaimed works, the exhibition highlights lesser-known aspects of his practice, offering new perspectives on one of the most influential figures in postwar American art and stressing Ruscha’s role as a keen observer of our rapidly changing world.

Raised in Oklahoma City, Ed Ruscha (American, born 1937) moved to Los Angeles in 1956 to study commercial art at the Chouinard Art Institute (now CalArts). Beginning with these formative years, the exhibition includes rarely seen paintings and works on paper made during, or in reference to, his extensive travels throughout the United States and Europe, revealing the artist’s keen attention to everyday sights—including vernacular architecture, consumer items, and public signage. The exhibition also reunites a number of breakthrough paintings, which Ruscha made shortly after graduating from Chouinard, in order to demonstrate his foundational and enduring interest in language for its plastic and sonic qualities. For instance, OOF (1962, reworked 1963), a painting in MoMA’s collection, depicts a one-syllable word with a bold shape and guttural sound that not only recalls the dynamic exclamations found in comic strips, but also highlights Ruscha’s acute understanding of design and typography.

Cross-media installations throughout the retrospective offer insight into Ruscha’s unique working methods. Viewers will have the opportunity to trace the migration of subjects across mediums—following, for example, an image of a Standard gasoline station from its small black-and-white reproduction in his self-published artist’s book, Twentysix Gasoline Stations (1963) to the monumental, brightly rendered oil paintings made shortly after, which remain as some of Ruscha’s most recognizable works. These displays also highlight the artist’s continual experimentation with unconventional materials and techniques, including drawings made with gunpowder, airbrushed paintings of enigmatic silhouettes, and vintage drum skins emblazoned with double negatives.

Ruscha’s multisensory Chocolate Room (1970)—the artist’s only single-room installation— are presented in New York for the first time on the occasion of the exhibition. Ruscha created this work for the United States pavilion during the 35th Venice Biennale in 1970, representing a major moment in his use of unexpected materials. Using an on-site press, the artist screenprinted chocolate paste onto hundreds of sheets of paper, lining the walls from floor to ceiling.

Serving as a counterpoint to Chocolate Room, a selection of paintings titled Course of Empire (1992/2003–5), first presented at the 51st Venice Biennale in 2005, are reunited for the retrospective. Inspired by a 19th-century painting cycle by Thomas Cole, Ruscha’s Course of Empire pairs a series of black-and-white paintings from 1992, showing generic industrial buildings, with new, colorful renditions made some 10 years later that imagine the same sites as they might exist under vastly different social and economic realities. This presentation of Course of Empire are complemented by a selection of photographic and working materials from the Getty Research Institute’s Ed Ruscha’s Streets of Los Angeles Archive. Spanning more than 40 years, the photographs, meticulously documenting various LA streets, chronicle a city in constant flux—just as this retrospective seeks to capture the ceaseless reinvention that has defined Ruscha’s prolific, six-decade career.