ARTISTS  |  NEWS  |  INVENTORY  |  CONTACT   Ed Ruscha Individual Work: Ed Ruscha (b. 1937, Omaha, Nebraska) is a first-generation Pop artist who is now recognized as one of the most ground-breaking and admired figures in the 20th and 21st century. In the 1960s Ruscha completed compositions of roadside signs and vacant gasoline stations, casting a critical lens on the banality of urban cityscapes. A Los Angeles-based artist, Ruscha is also well known for inserting wry text onto billboard signs erected in wide, minimal panoramic landscapes. But perhaps his most pervasive explorations are his text-based compositions in which he juxtaposes deadpan phrases or single words with infinite variety and ingenuity, allowing for the viewer to creatively reconsider the utility of language.   Ruscha has been the subject of numerous museum retrospectives, which have traveled worldwide, beginning in 1983 with the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Centre Georges Pompidou in 1989, and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in 2000. In 2004, The Whitney Museum of American Art organized two simultaneous exhibitions: "Cotton Puffs, Q-tips, Smoke and Mirrors: The Drawings of Ed Ruscha," which traveled to the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles and then to the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., and "Ed Ruscha and Photography." Another exhibition of Ruscha"s photographs was organized for the Jeu de Paume in Paris in 2006. In addition, Ruscha was the United States representative at the 51st Venice Biennale in 2005.