BIOGRAPHY: ED RUSCHA

Born in 1937 in Omaha, Nebraska, Edward Ruscha moved to Oklahoma City in 1941 and to Los Angeles in 1956 to complete his education at the Chouinard Art Institute. In 1963, he began showing his work at the progressive Ferus Gallery in L.A. In 1968 Ruscha had his first international show in Cologne, Germany at Galerie Rudolf Zwirner. A few years later, Ruscha began showing his working with the legendary Leo Castelli in New York, and subsequently with the Gagosian Gallery in New York and Beverly Hills.

Ed Ruscha has consistently mingled his context of Los Angeles with the motifs of language and landscape to communicate a particular urban experience. Encompassing photography, drawing, painting, and film, Ruscha’s work elevates the viewer out of the banality of urban life in order to recognize the barrage of mass media-fed images and information that assault us daily. His early career as a graphic artist continues to strongly influence Ruscha’s aesthetic and thematic approach.

In 1998, the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles organized a retrospective of Ruscha’s works on paper. The following year, Gagosian Gallery, Beverly Hills showed new paintings by Ruscha as well as “Metro Plots” in New York, a series of work in which Ruscha transformed city planning maps into sublime landscapes. A major retrospective of Ruscha’s career opened at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C. in June 2000 and traveled to the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, The Miami Art Museum, and the Modern Art Museum of Ft. Worth, TX. In 2001 Ruscha was elected to The American Academy of Arts and Letters as a member of the Department of Art. Ruscha was recently chosen by a committee of American museum curators to represent the United States at the 2005 Venice Biennale. His work will be featured in the U.S. pavilion at the prestigious art festival during June 2005.

Ruscha’s most recent major solo exhibitions have been at the Gagosian Galleries: the ”Palindrome Paintings” series was unveiled at the Chelsea space in May 2002 while the most comprehensive display of the artist’s photographs was shown at the Beverly Hills location in March 2003.

The exhibition Cotton Puffs, Q-tips^®, Smoke and Mirrors: The Drawings of Ed Ruscha was organized by The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, where it was on view from June 24 through September 26, 2004 before traveling to the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, from October 17, 2004 through January 17, 2005. A condensed version of the exhibition is on view at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, from February 13 through May 30, 2005.

General Information

The National Gallery of Art and its Sculpture Garden are at all times free to the public. They are located on the National Mall between 3rd and 9th Streets at Constitution Avenue NW, and are open Monday through Saturday from 10:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. and Sunday from 11:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m. The Gallery is closed on December 25 and January 1. For information call (202) 737-4215 or the Telecommunications Device for the Deaf (TDD) at (202) 842-6176, or visit the Gallery's Web site at www.nga.gov.

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