ED RUSCHA AT THE HAYWARD

Loved by many and a friend of WOF, Ed was part of the 'cool school' of artists in California. He made LA his home from Omaha, Nebraska and although he maintains that LA never affected or influence his work, his proselyte, David Lynch, feels just the opposite.“Ed has said California hasn’t influenced him one little bit, but I disagree. I like to think the California sun has burnt out all unnecessary elements in his work.” Lynch, who also adopted LA as his home, has offered his own interpretations of it in films such as Mulholland Drive and Inland Empire. The bigger truth is that you can’t look at a lot of Ruscha’s paintings without thinking of LA, “with its sign-filled streets sprawling like dispersed and diffused flows of random information”, as Rugoff notes in his catalogue essay. (Ruscha, by the way, once had business cards printed to aid in the pronunciation of his name: “Ed-werd Rew-shay”. And how would Lynch describe Ruscha, as a human being? “Clean!” he immediately shoots back. CLEAN. Is that a Ruscha word painting? CLEAN. The exhibition at The Hayward London until Jan 10th 2010