Ed Ruscha is just about America's best known living artist and certainly the most influential. Over the last 40 years, Ruscha's work has explored and played with pop culture and commercial imagery, type and typography. It is easy to call him a kind of West Coast Warhol - laconic and cool to Warhol's weird and unnerving - but where Warhol was a portraitist, of people, personality, power (and the definitive artist in the age of mechanical reproduction), Ruscha is a landscapist: words in landscape and words as landscape.
Wallpaper* contributing photographer Laura Wilson was Richard Avedon's assistant for five years, and worked alongside Avedon when he put together the 'In The American West' series. She has since emerged as one of the country's leading photographers in her own right. Wilson was given rare access to Ruscha's large Venice studio, and the cast of characters who surround him: his brother, son, six dogs and Harley the mechanic. Ruscha was always polite and charming but always busy, busier than ever.
Here is Laura Wilson's exclusive private viewing of Ruscha's LA studio in three parts, plus selected works from three volumes of the artist's series Catalogue Raisonne of the Paintings:
Catalogue Raisonné of the Paintings: Volumes 1, 2 and 3, by Ed Ruscha (Steidl)
www.steidlville.com
