Born in 1937 in America’s Midwest, Ed Ruscha grew up in Oklahoma City. In 1956, aged 18, he set out for California, driving 1,500 miles west on the legendary Route 66. Arriving in Los Angeles, he enrolled at the Chouinard Art Institute, a Disney-sponsored art school where he studied fine art alongside typesetting and graphic design. At that time, abstract expressionism held sway in the classroom. Finding that this spontaneous, gestural approach left no room for his own ideas, Ruscha began to make paintings that were premeditated and planned, in which text and imagery from everyday life converged. By the early 1960s, he was perceived to have to have created a new form of visual landscape combining typography with commonplace objects.

Over the past half-century, Ruscha’s art has evolved in unpredictable ways. At the same time, the things that first fired his imagination – cinema and film; driving, roadside signs, and the flat, featureless landscapes of the American West; the city, filled with constant visual noise; the phenomenon of human communication and the pleasures of typography – remain the basis for his art.

Ed Ruscha has been based in Los Angeles for all his working life, but he is no stranger to London or to the Hayward Gallery. He visited the city for the first time in 1961 and first exhibited at the Hayward in 1969, the year after the gallery opened, in the large survey exhibition Pop Art. In 1971 he was included in the Hayward exhibition 11 Los Angeles Artists. Four years later, the Arts Council Touring Exhibitions (forerunner of Hayward Gallery Touring) toured Edward Ruscha: Prints and Publications 1962-74 to 12 UK galleries. In 2004 he was elected an Honorary Academician of London’s Royal Academy of Arts.