Exhibition: Ed Ruscha roads and insects

This display of prints by American artist Ed Ruscha (b. 1937) focuses on his prevailing interest in the physical world around him.

At its centre is Insects, a portfolio of six colour screenprints depicting life-sized flies, ants and cockroaches, complete with shadows to give the illusion of three-dimensional critters resting, swarming or scuttling across flat surfaces.

Printed in 1972, the portfolio is displayed here in full. It was acquired by the British Museum in 2023 as a gift from a private collector in memory of Paul Thomson to the American Friends of the British Museum. The display also includes a portfolio of seven soft-ground etchings from 2001 titled Los Francisco San Angeles, in which Ruscha creates imaginary maps that intersect the principal roads of LA and San Francisco, and two prints from the artist's 2014 series of Rusty Signs, which appear to comment on the fading of the American Dream.

In 1956, aged just 18, Ruscha moved from Oklahoma City in the South Central US to Los Angeles, the West Coast city with which he is most closely associated and where he has been based ever since. The near 1,400-mile journey along Route 66 would become very familiar to him over years of travelling back and forth and inspire his first artist's book, Twentysix Gasoline Stations. Self-published in 1963, this was a cheaply printed paperback containing black-and-white photographs of the filling stations that punctuated the highway like 'cultural belches in the landscape' (Ruscha). Ever since those early days in LA, where he trained in commercial graphic design, roads, cars, gas stations, signs and billboard advertisements have occurred frequently in Ruscha's art across a variety of media including painting, printmaking, photography, drawing and film.