“Now Then”

The Los Angeles County Museum of Art will soon play host to one of the largest retrospective exhibitions to date on famed American artist, Ed Ruscha. Born in Oklahoma and having lived and worked in LA since 1956, Ruscha is best known for his ambiguous interplay between words and images, often pitting humorous haiku-like messaging overlaid on static depictions of an unassuming gas station, apartment building, corporate branding or the tip of a mountain range—resulting in a sort of tension between vision and language.

In collaboration with Avant Arte, Ruscha will release a new time-limited print based on his popular “Actual Size” (1962) painting. As one of the more recognizable works from his career, “Actual Size” depicts a large “SPAM” logo, with a smaller SPAM can hovering underneath, as a commentary on how the culture of everyday consumerism informs the vernacular of American society. The original painting was created to reference the phrase, “SPAM in a can”, first coined by journalists to describe astronauts being jettisoned into space in a self-piloting rocket. Coinciding with Ed Ruscha / Now Then, exhibiting at LACMA from April 7 to October 6, 2024.

Posted by: TAWD on April 1, 2024