I wanted to make pictures but I didn't want to paint. Some painters just love paint - they get up in the morning and grab a brush, not knowing what they are going to do, but they just have to have that hot brush moving those colours. But I was more interested in the end result than I was in the means to an end. Ed Ruscha This marks the first major Australian exhibition of work by one of America's most influential and independent contemporary artists, Ed Ruscha. A name synonymous with the Los Angeles landscape, Ed Ruscha references highways, parking lots, palm trees, apartment blocks and the false glitz of Hollywood, in a career spanning more than forty years. ED RUSCHA introduces viewers to a diverse and comprehensive selection of the artist’s films, photographs, paintings, books and drawings from the 1960s to the present day, including a number of new paintings of word phrases set against highly stylised mountain vistas – made especially for the MCA and subsequent tour venues in Rome and Berlin. Working directly with the artist the MCA will also present some rarely seen material, including Ruscha’s two 16mm films Premium (1970) and Miracle (1975), representing one of the few times they have been screened publicly in the past two decades. From single words to catchy phrases, puns to word plays, text forms an integral component of Ruscha’s practice and is explored with the artist’s characteristic deadpan irony and understated humour. The exhibition tours to the the Museum of Contemporary Art in Rome, Italy and National Gallery in Berlin, Germany.