EDINBURGH, SCOTLAND.- The spirit of the cool, modern American West is captured at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art this autumn, in a new exhibition of work by Los Angeles-based artist Ed Ruscha. Part of the Scottish National Gallery’s A Year of American Art, Ed Ruscha provides a comprehensive overview of this consistently inventive artist’s career, comprising some 120 paintings, drawings, photographs and books that date from the 1960s to the present day. Ruscha’s name is synonymous with the highways, parking lots, apartment blocks and palm trees of the Californian landscape. One of the most influential American artists of the last forty years, he is known for his exploration of the emotive power of language in art. Works on display in the gallery will include a series of bold landscapes overlaid with playful, enigmatic words and phrases.

In 1956, Ruscha took the legendary Route 66 from his childhood home in Oklahoma City to Los Angeles where he was to study commercial art. The experience then, and on frequent later trips, had a lasting impact on Ruscha and his art: he was fascinated by the wide-open landscape, frightening in its vast sublime emptiness, and by the man-made hoardings with their brash advertising messages that dotted the roadside. Alongside Ruscha’s car-seat view of the world, the artist’s West-Coast base led to a preoccupation with the Hollywood film industry. Many of his works reflect the way words are used alongside images in early films. Indeed, the exhibition contains a whole group of works that deal with the old custom of including, often in gothic type, the phrase: ‘The End’. There is a perceptibly apocalyptic air about these works which some believe refer back to Ruscha’s Catholic upbringing.

Edinburgh is the only UK venue for this exhibition, which was shown to great acclaim earlier this year in Sydney and Rome. Ed Ruscha was organised by the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney, in collaboration with the Anthony d’Offay Gallery in London. Throughout 2004-5 the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art is showing work by some of the giants of post-war and contemporary American Art. In addition to Ruscha, A Year of American Art celebrates the achievements of artists such as Andy Warhol, Jasper Johns and Cindy Sherman.