Ed Ruscha: Course Of Empire

Exhibition at the National Gallery, Londres, 11 June - 7 October 2018

Over the span of his six-decade career, Ed Ruscha (1937-) has created an elegant, stylised vision of an overlooked modern American landscape of petrol stations, highways and industrial units.

This exhibition catalogue presents Ruscha's ten-painting installation that evokes Thomas Cole's epic five-painting cycle The Course of Empire (1834-1836). Unlike Cole's grandiose vision of the rise and fall of a classical civilisation, Ruscha's Course of Empire is a seemingly barren, simplified vision, revealing his preoccupation for Los Angeles urban landscape: utilitarian structures with no pretension to beauty but redolent of economic might and global reach, their mundane forms evolving in response to material needs.