The first major UK retrospective to focus exclusively on the paintings of one of the most influential and pioneering American artists of the past half-century. Spanning Ed Ruscha’s entire career, the exhibition features 78 paintings, many on public display for the first time, and reveals the depth and breadth of Ruscha’s achievement as a painter whose interests in printed matter, graphic design, cinema, photography and the cultural landscape of the American West make his elegant and provocative work both playful and subversive.

Born in 1937 in America’s Midwest, Ed Ruscha grew up in Oklahoma City. In 1956, aged 18, he set out for California, driving 1,500 miles west on the legendary Route 66. Arriving in Los Angeles, he enrolled at the Chouinard Art Institute, a Disney-sponsored art school where he studied fine art alongside typesetting and graphic design. At that time, abstract expressionism held sway in the classroom. Finding that this spontaneous, gestural approach left no room for his own ideas, Ruscha began to make paintings that were premeditated and planned, in which text and imagery from everyday life converged. By the early 1960s, he was perceived to have to have created a new form of visual landscape combining typography with commonplace objects.

Over the past half-century, Ruscha’s art has evolved in unpredictable ways. At the same time, the things that first fired his imagination – cinema and film; driving, roadside signs, and the flat, featureless landscapes of the American West; the city, filled with constant visual noise; the phenomenon of human communication and the pleasures of typography – remain the basis for his art.

Southbank Centre, Hayward Gallery, Belvedere Road, London, SE1 8XX, through Jan 1o, www.southbankcentre.co.uk