EDINBURGH.- Important paintings, drawings and photography spanning 50 years of the career of one of the most significant artists working today, Ed Ruscha (b.1937), have gone on display this spring at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art in Edinburgh.

ARTIST ROOMS: Music from the Balconies – Ed Ruscha and Los Angeles is the first exhibition of Ruscha’s art at the Gallery in over a decade. The two-room display features various works which explore the iconic American artist’s deep engagement with West Coast American culture and landscape.

The exhibition takes its title from one of Ruscha’s key paintings, which he generously donated to the ARTIST ROOMS collection in 2009, and which is being shown in Scotland for the first time.

The ARTIST ROOMS collection of modern and contemporary art is jointly owned by the National Galleries of Scotland and Tate on behalf of the nation. Works from the collection are shared with museums and galleries around the UK and more than 40 million people have visited ARTIST ROOMS exhibitions since the collection was established in 2008.

This exhibition is part of the eighth year of the ARTIST ROOMS programme around the UK, giving audiences the chance to see works from the collection in their hometowns, supported by Arts Council England, Art Fund and Creative Scotland. Developed with over 30 Associate venues in partnership with Ferens Art Gallery, Hull, the current programme runs until Spring 2019 and also offers young people the chance to explore works by major artists from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries through creative learning projects.

Over the last eight years, the ARTIST ROOMS collection of Ruscha’s art has increased substantially both in size and standing, and currently comprises some 120 works dating between 1962 and 2010. These include a large group of photographic and printed works on loan to ARTIST ROOMS from the Artist Rooms Foundation.

Ruscha is one of the pre-eminent artists of his generation. For six decades, he has channelled his fascination with language and the act of communication into paintings, drawings, books, photography and print-making.

In 1962, Ruscha’s work was shown alongside Roy Lichtenstein and Andy Warhol in the iconic exhibition New Paintings of Common Objects at the Pasadena Art Museum, one of the first seminal displays of Pop Art. However, while Ruscha’s work shares many of Pop Art’s motifs, his playful use of words, phrases and typography have set him firmly apart from any movement.

ARTIST ROOMS: Music from the Balconies highlights the ways in which Ruscha has consistently drawn upon landscape and architecture, cinema, brands, automobile-culture and language that refer and relate to Los Angeles and Hollywood. It brings together a number of photographic series that record different aspects of the Los Angeles cityscape. Such works exemplify Ruscha’s approach to capturing the growing prosperity of post-war American society, and demonstrate his acute observation of the contrasts between the aspirations and realities of the American Dream.

Amongst the photographic series featured is Ruscha’s iconic Sunset Strip Portfolio (1976/1995). To create these images, the artist used motorised cameras mounted on the back of a pick-up truck to capture famous locales on both sides of the road of the Sunset Strip, the mile-and-a-half stretch on West Hollywood’s Sunset Boulevard. His original images were presented in a book with a concertina format, seven-and-a-half metres in length, showing dual continuous views of the buildings along the road. He revisited the photographs in 1995 to create a portfolio, scoring the surface of the negatives with razor blades and sandpaper to dramatic effect.

Alongside these photographic works, the display features several important paintings and drawings which demonstrate the way in which Hollywood’s much glamorised cinematic heritage has been appropriated as subject matter by the artist. These include the large-scale painting, The Final End (1992), in which Ruscha pays homage to the end credits of Hollywood movies, and the iconic drawing, Trademark #5 (1962), being lent by Tate in London, which depicts the 20th Century Fox film studios logo.

The monumental painting, The Music from the Balconies (1984) is one of a significant body of paintings from the 1980s, in which Ruscha overlaid landscapes with text. In this case, the text is taken from J G Ballard’s 1975 novel High-Rise. The filmic atmosphere of the painting is conjured through the combination of the expansive sky, illuminated by a distant sunset, and the unsettling nature of the text layered over it. Ruscha has admitted that it is an ‘illustration’ of some of the themes and ideas in Ballard’s book, with the juxtaposition between beauty and violence suggesting the conflict between man and nature.

These paintings, and other works in the exhibition such as Honk (1962) and Radio (1962), not only show the influence of Ruscha’s original training as an advertising sign-writer, but also confirm how the world of commercial image-making, and its impact of its delivery on the viewer, has remained a central theme in Ruscha’s art throughout his career.

For many, Ruscha is one of the half-dozen most important living painters, whose influence, first across the West Coast, and later across America, has had a profound impact on art in every country in which it has been shown. His influence on photography and bookmaking are equally transformative. For many young artists his work over the last half-century has been both liberating and revelatory.