Ed Ruscha: highlights from a fifty-year career

American artist Ed Ruscha is an icon of modern art and his work is exceedingly prolific to this day. Is he one of the first pop artists, a trail-blazer of conceptual art, a late surrealist, a pioneer of postmodernism, or a bit of everything, all rolled into one?

Ruscha’s first solo exhibition in Sweden, a travelling show on view at the Moderna Museet in Stockholm until 5 September 2010, charts his remarkable career.  From the punchy word paintings in paint, and later in organic materials, which made his name and which still characterise his work, to the graphic books Various Small Fires and Twentysix Gasoline Stations; his later experiments with photography and light and work from the present day continue to inspire new generations discovering his radical oeuvre.