Pop Art Is. . . (Ed Ruscha) Poster

This poster reproduces Ed Ruscha's Bundle of Pencils, Breaking Glass (1968–69) and was produced in 2007 for Pop Art Is. . ., a group exhibition at Gagosian's Britannia Street gallery in London.

Marking fifty years since Richard Hamilton's definition of Pop art, the exhibition brought together artists addressing how the term's meaning had shifted since. Ruscha's painting sets a bundle of yellow pencils and a glass caught mid-break against a plain ground, rendered in the flat, illustrational style he uses for trompe l'oeil images of ordinary objects.

Ruscha (b. 1937) moved to Los Angeles in 1956 and built a practice around vernacular language and objects rendered with commercial precision. Bundle of Pencils, Breaking Glass reflects his recurring interest in manipulating scale and surface within plain, everyday subjects. The London show placed the painting within a wider survey of Pop's legacy rather than presenting it as part of a Ruscha solo exhibition.