Edward Ruscha

Born in 1937 at Omaha, Nebraska. In 1942 he moved to Oklahoma City. Inspired by a friend, he began to draw comics of everyday life in 1947. In 1948 he took painting lessons from a portraitist. In 1949 he made his first visit to California. From 1953 to 1956 he took art classes at high school and showed a keen interest in printing techniques and typography. He read books on Dadaism. In 1955 he went to Mexico City. He took courses in graphics in Los Angeles and studied at the Chouinard Art Institute and the school for Walt Disney illustrators. In 1957 he was impressed by the work of Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg. He studied book printing in 1959. In 1960-61 he worked for an advertising agency. In 1961 he made reliefs on wood, book objects, collages and photographs. He also travelled in Europe. In Paris he took notice of the fine arts. He made his first pictures using words, e.g. Honk, Radio and Olof. In 1962 he completed his first picture using three-dimensional lettering, Large Trademark with Eight Spotlights. In 1963 he published his book Twenty-six Gasoline Stations. In 1964 he began his drawings of words on strips of paper. In 1965 his book Some Los Angeles Apartments was published. For two years he designed the layout for the art magazine Artforum, using the pseudonym Eddie Russia. In 1966 his book Every Building on the Sunset Strip was published. He began to work on his drawings of handwriting. He produced further books and the silk-screen print Hollywood. In 1969 he published the folder Stains, his first use of organic substances. He taught printing and drawing at the University of California, Los Angeles. For the 1970 Venice Biennale he made the Chocolate Room, which consisted of 360 sheets of paper printed by silkscreen with chocolate and stuck to the entire wall-surface of a room. He made the film Premium, and in 1975 the film Miracle. In 1976 he built himself a house in the desert. In 1978 he produced the book Hard Light with Lawrence Weirner. In 1979 he painted his first wide-screen pictures. In 1982 the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art put on the exhibition I Don't Want No Retrospective - The Works of Edward Ruscha. In 1985 he obtained a commision for a mural for the Miami Dade Public Library and made eight panels with the words Words Without Thoughts Never to Heaven Go. He has had comprehensive retrospectives in Lyon, Nassau and Münster. Source: WWW Pop Art http://www.fi.muni.cz/~toms/PopArt/Biographies/ruscha.html.ISO-8859-1http://www.beatmuseum.org