Mufflers by Ed Ruscha shows the upper corner of an automotive service building, cropped to its canopy and roofline, MUFFLERS lettered across the fascia in bold block capitals against a pale sign board. The structure is rendered in soft grey tones, the garage bay below the canopy a deep dark opening, the sky behind it a warm grey-brown that suggests the particular hazy light of a Los Angeles afternoon. The building is not glamorous. It is exactly what it says it is.

The car runs through Ruscha's work like a continuous thread. He drove to Los Angeles in 1956, and the automobile — its infrastructure, its culture, its demand for petrol and parking and servicing — became one of his primary subjects. Twentysix Gasoline Stations documented the stations that kept cars moving; the Standard Station paintings and prints elevated the forecourt to the level of serious art; the parking lot works catalogued the spaces cars occupied when they stopped. Mufflers extends that attention to the less celebrated end of automotive culture — not the sleek petrol station with its corporate canopy and branded pumps, but the repair shop, the service garage, the place where cars go when something has gone wrong with them.

A muffler is the component that silences the exhaust — the part of the vehicle designed to reduce noise, to make the engine's operation less audible to the world outside. MUFFLERS on a building is an instruction to bring your car's noise here and have it dealt with. Ruscha, who had spent three decades finding formal possibilities in the commercial typography of Los Angeles, gives the word the same careful attention he brought to STANDARD and TIRES and UPHOLSTERY — the same flat-edged framing, the same atmospheric ground, the same refusal to editorialise. The building is muffled too, its presence quiet and considered, the drama reduced to exactly the right level.

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