Ed Ruscha (pronounced Rew-shay) as his announcement card for his first exhibition made clear exhibits at the Hayward Gallery.  I had forgotten about the brilliance of the brutalist architecture at the Hayward, my Friday night visit would have been worthwhile even if the gallery had been completely empty.

Ruscha use’s banal words as shapes, treating as them as objects, noting that they ‘live in a world of no size.’  ’Noise’ (1963) alongside ‘Boss’ were my favourite paintings from this series. ‘I always looked at a word like it was a horizontal bunch of abstract shapes, which is really what it is.’

The Mountain series started in 1997, the mountains were there to support the drama of the abstract words.  The idea being that if you looked at the words long enough, they lost their meaning.

The frames are also brilliant, notably glass-less canvas in deep aluminium box frames.