Metro Mattresses

Metro Mattresses collects the paintings Ed Ruscha showed under that title at Sprüth Magers, Berlin, continuing his decades-long interest in language treated as both image and object.

The 28-page hardcover catalogue is bound in linen with a plain paper title label, echoing the deadpan typographic presentation of Ruscha's paintings themselves. It was designed by Swantje Hoffmann and published by Sprüth Magers to document the exhibition, and issued together with a promotional poster.

Ruscha has worked since the 1960s across painting, photography, and artist's books, treating words, phrases, and vernacular Los Angeles imagery as material for repeated formal investigation. Metro Mattresses extends that practice into a further set of paintings built around a found or invented phrase, presented with the same restraint that has defined his word paintings since the 1980s.