Tuesday 19 January 2010

Ed Ruscha: 50 years of painting @The Hayward Gallery

I managed to catch the Ed Ruscha exhibition at the Hayward Gallery on the very last day. The exhibition, a retrospective of Ruscha's long career, filled both floors of the Southbank space.

What I enjoyed most was the variety of works curated for this show, harking back to the very early experiments with typeface and semantics through to his fascination with 20th Century architecture and landscape. The common thread in his works is a pure American aesthetic felt not only in the Pop Art movement but in today's graphic design and print publishing arena.



My favourite works were the Silhouette series where he learnt new spray painting techniques to create a melancholy and moody mid-western landscape.

Always evolving and ever interesting, I left the gallery invigorated and challenged and wanting to see even more of Ruscha's work.

(Image source: edruscha.com)

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