In Metro Mattresses, Ed Ruscha turns once again to the streets of Los Angeles—a landscape he has observed with analytical calm and conceptual wit for decades.

The subject this time: abandoned mattresses, isolated in various states of neglect. Each of the twelve works presents a mattress or group of mattresses against a neutral backdrop, stripped of context yet saturated with suggestion.

Formally, the series recalls Ruscha’s seminal works such as Twentysix Gasoline Stations (1963) and Every Building on the Sunset Strip (1966). Yet where those works dealt with architecture and infrastructure, Metro Mattresses shifts the gaze to objects of private use, now displaced and exposed in the public realm.

The book mirrors this quiet directness. Printed on sturdy board pages, the images appear without commentary, allowing space for the viewer’s own associations. Ruscha’s detached eye and subtle humor transform these discarded surfaces into monuments of everyday life—marking absence, intimacy, and the quiet entropy of the urban environment.