With Ed Ruscha / Now Then, the Museum of Modern Art presents a career-spanning retrospective of an American art institution. Offering more than 200 works in total, it is the most comprehensive retrospective of the major pop artist and conceptualist ever attempted.
One of the distinctive aspects about the Moma show is that it offers the ability to see Ruscha evolve over time. The lead curator, Christophe Cherix, said he wanted to be comprehensive enough to avoid the fragmentary feel that he believes other large Ruscha shows have had. “The idea of the exhibition was to really try to bring out the work in a different way,” he said. “To me, other exhibitions always felt very medium-specific, very fragmentary. And I felt that Ruscha was sometimes too locked into specific tendencies.”
