Ed Ruscha is the visual artist of the cityscapes of his native Los Angeles which he represents in terms of a bristling thicket of billboards and signs. The work has connections with pop art, minimalism and conceptualism, without ever fitting neatly into any of these stylistic categories.

The image below looks like a logo for an as yet unincorporated Hollywood studio financed by an oil company as well as referring to standardisation in industrial capitalism:

His latest work transposes the language of the city --- popular culture, word depictions, and commercial graphics---to the Californian countryside--and it continues to explore and play with pop culture and commercial imagery, type and typography. Words are objects --a formation of cut-out coloured shapes. Often the relationships and juxtapositions between word and image are puzzling and the meanings elusive.

Though Ruscha sees his work as simply a collection of facts about words, gasoline stations, street frontages these were not seen as interesting. Now, because of him, we see gasoline stations as having angles, colours and shapes as we look at the long, sign-filled streets spewing out words, images, screens---we are immersed in a mediascape.

I'm attracted to Ruscha's little books with their witty cataloguing of the everyday world. As Adrian Searle observes in The Guardian their understated style and design - are a kind of precise visual poetry of the unspectacular or the everyday. Searle says that

In the 1960s, Ruscha picked up a camera and started to make small books featuring peculiar and mundane series of photographs. These include Twenty Six Gasoline Stations (1962), shot on a journey through California, Texas and Oklahoma; Thirty Four Parking Lots, with overhead shots of the layouts and markings of, well, almost empty parking lots; books of apartment buildings, records (album sleeves on the left page, the vinyl discs on the right), vacant real estate lots. A Few Palm Trees is a 64-page book with only 14 illustrations.