Ed Ruscha: Books and Paintings

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The combination of pictorial motifs and words or sentences has long been a special feature of Ed Ruscha’s (born 1937) paintings. As he himself commented in an interview in 1989: "Words are pattern-like, and in their horizontality they answer my investigation into landscape ... they are almost not words--they are objects that become words." This attraction to combinations of word and image has naturally disposed Ruscha toward the book as an art form, and as both an object and subject in his paintings. This…