Ruscha's images are mementos of the human race taken back with them by visitors from another planet, as unsettling as his typewriter lying in a dusty road, the airless cathedral of his Texas filling station, the lettered symbols of his commercial signs that say everything and tell us nothing - J.G.Ballard, July 1999

Ed Ruscha's unique and prescient vision of the modern world, seen from the vantage point of his home in California, is on view at the Anthony d'Offay Gallery from 5 May to 3 June.

The subject, mountains and highways, of this new series of paintings and works on paper is the conjunction of urban and rural, the impact of man upon nature, characteristic of the planet in our time. Both subjects, as well as the use of words with which they are juxtaposed, are long-standing preoccupations in Ruscha's work. They have roots in California, but also a universality which is simultaneously frightening and inevitable, cosy and familiar, chilling and exciting. Exactitude of execution and realistic imagery are the precision tools the artist offers the traveller on this journey; they are the embarkation point or perhaps the return ticket for a revelatory voyage, with the artist as dead-pan conductor, through abstract, pictorial, and philosophical dimensions.

Ed Ruscha has described the process, in his customary deprecatory style:
Painting is all about capturing something. I never fully know whether I've captured anything, whether it's an event or a contradiction or a kind of disorientation. Possibly all I've captured is an end result devoid of anything objective or subjective or even the fuzz in between. Art about the subject of sports is art usually made by people who know and love sports. But I can't align myself with my art in a way to confirm that I know and love the subjects I paint, Sometimes I know my subject better than I love them and sometimes just the opposite.

My belief in commonplace issues continues to surface in my work and I find that snowcapped mountains and aerial road maps are mundane enough to glorify in paint. Often the subject such as a mountain is used almost like background scenery to a stronger issue which might be word combinations. I am more firmly rooted in issues of abstract art that I am with things figurative, yet I use figurative objects. This is a contradiction that is never resolved but does not confuse me.

Ed Ruscha's exhibition at the Anthony d'Offay Gallery coincides with the start of an important retrospective, which runs from June to September 2000 at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington D.C.; it will then be shown at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago from November 2000 to February 2001; Miami Art Museum, from March to June 2001; Modern Art Museum, Fort Worth from July to September 2001; and in the UK from October 2001 to January 2002 at the Museum of Modern Art, Oxford.

A retrospective of Ruscha's editioned work (1959-1999) organised by the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, will open at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art on 4 June 2000, before travelling to The University of South Florida Contemporary Art Museum, Tampa, Florida, in October 2000.

The artist will be giving a talk at the ICA, London from 7.30 - 9pm on 8 May. The event will include a screening of Ruscha's first film, Premium (1971), starring the artist Larry Bell and the model L‚on Bing and based on the 1969 book Crackers, which in turn was derived from the 1967 short-story by Mason Williams, entitled "How to Derive the Maximum Enjoyment from Crackers". Tickets are £7, £6 concessions, £5 ICA members. Seats are limited so please book early. Tickets and further information are available from the ICA box office: tel 020 7930 3647.

This London celebration of Ed Ruscha's work also includes the launch of a signed limited edition CD, I Want to Hang Out with Ed Ruscha, produced by the Rocket Gallery, London.

Mountains and Portraits, a limited edition boxed set of 9 illustrated cards and envelopes, featuring an original text by J.G. Ballard, will be on sale during the exhibition. A limited number of this edition will be available signed by the artist.

"Words have temperatures to me. When they have reached a certain point and become hot words they appeal to me...sometimes I have a dream that if a word gets too hot and too appealing, it will boil apart, and I won't be able to read or think of it."
Ed Ruscha

Ed Ruscha's exhibition at Anthony d'Offay Gallery, his first in London since 1990, will bring together a retrospective of works on paper and a completely new body of work, eight shaped canvas paintings.

Since moving to Los Angeles in 1956, Ed Ruscha's drawings, paintings, books and films, have been inspired by the West Coast of the United States, with its juxtaposition of earthquakes and diners, mountains and palm trees, desert and billboards, beaches and movie screens. However Ruscha's works have consistently defied classifications such as realism, pop or conceptual art.

This group of Ed Ruscha's works on paper, from 1961 to the present day, demonstrates his acute understanding of the intersection, or sometimes the disjunction, between the visual and the verbal capacity of words and images. Ruscha's distinctive wit - his passion for pun and double entendre - permeates everywhere. Choices of medium, from delicate pastel to spinach juice or even gunpowder, add to the sensual quality of these drawings, and to the layers of meaning that we discover in them.

Ed Ruscha's new paintings explore further the way being and meaning sustain and energise each other by using the physical shape of the canvas as a conceptual as well as formal device. Within the distended frames of The Mountain and Swollen Tune, text so prominent that it appears to have a structural function is painted over images of snowy mountain peaks. In Woman With Spreader, a wooden stretcher bar is playfully painted over the image of a centrespread. In Metro, Petro, Neuro, Psycho, words are broken into their component parts so that they appear to impact on the canvas, causing its sides to swell. Perhaps if Ed Ruscha's activities relate to any tradition, it is to the philosophical consideration of the nature of things. These works seem to explore the nature of their existence, and therefore ours.

An illustrated hardbound publication accompanies this exhibition,
with fifty colour plates, and essays by Neville Wakefield and Dave Hickey.