ART-PREVIEW:Sterling Ruby-That My Nails Can Reach Unto Thine Eyes
Sterling Ruby works in a wide range of mediums, from glazed biomorphic ceramics and poured urethane sculptures, to large-scale spray-painted canvases, nail polish drawings, collages and videos. Through his varied practice he conducts an assault on materials and social structures, referencing subjects that include marginalised societies, maximum-security prisons, modernist architecture, artefacts and antiquities, graffiti, bodybuilders, the mechanisms of warfare, cults and urban gangs.
By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Gagosian Archive
New Paintings an ceramics are on show in Sterling Ruby’s solo exhibition “THAT MY NAILS CAN REACH UNTO THINE EYES”. Ruby composes his “WIDW” paintings (2016- ) with thick, vibrant coats of acrylic and oil paint, also adhering squares of cardboard and patterned fabric onto canvas. These collaged elements demarcate the canvas into halves and smaller rectangles, transforming the compositions into gridded windowpanes that offer a glimpse into the physical and cerebral strata of Ruby’s working process. The exhibition is divided in half between both floors of the Gagosian Athens gallery: visitors enter a suite of black-grounded “night” paintings before ascending the stairs to reach a set of ethereal “daylight” paintings. Passing through physical space and metaphorical time of day, the viewer follows a path akin to Shakespeare’s characters in their passage from luminous dreamscapes to bright-hued works that impart a vivid psychological clarity. Also, on view is “ACHERON” (2021), part of Ruby’s “Basin Theology” series (2009- ), that invokes the name of the river in Greek mythology that carried the souls of the dead through the underworld to Hades. To make “ACHERON” Ruby gathered broken pieces from previous ceramics projects in a flat-bottomed vessel, fusing everything through the firing process. Glazed in volcanic black and lustrous turquoise, the fragments emerge from the kiln in a reincarnated form reminiscent of entombed remains, the similar technique has been used for “MORTAR. KISSING WALL’S HOLE” (2021).
Sterling Ruby’s oeuvre is diverse, formally and thematically, and difficult to characterize. While his “SP” (spray painting), “BC” (bleach collage) or more recent “WIDW” (window) series include color abstractions with a composition and materiality that explores traditional and contemporary senses of beauty, they also bristle with a clear subtext of psychological unrest. The artist’s geometric solids series consists of monumental minimalist sculptures made of Formica composite that Ruby has covered with graffiti, scratchiti, smears, fingerprints and other vandalizing methods. His “SCALES” series comprises mobile sculptures that merge modernist forms with such unusual readymades as paint buckets and industrial steel drums. Ruby’s “SOFTWORKS” recall labyrinthine bundles of amorphous, stuffed fabric figures with an unsettling corporeality. Apart from their aesthetic dimension, some of Ruby’s “STOVE” sculptures also serve as functional wood-burning stoves. The artist’s ceramics, which he produces in a variety of series and sizes, have organic shapes and sumptuous glazes and are often reminiscent of charred animal and human remains. His large-scale, totem-like sculptures made of polyurethane resin have a similarly visceral effect, echoing the visual repertoire of horror and science fiction films. Ruby has drawn on plexiglas with nail polish, made disturbing analogue and digital photo collages, and repurposed vehicles such as an LAPD squad car and a salvaged American submarine into sculptures. The range of media the artist uses is mirrored in an aesthetic strategy that he himself describes as “schizophrenic”. Yet for all their multifaceted character, Ruby’s works share a common denominator. His creations clearly spring from an interconnected network and often make direct reference to one another, sometimes at the level of an ingenious recycling of used materials. Common to all of his paintings and objects is a sustained resistance to the ideological limitations of minimalism and conceptual art, their “high culture” social practices and legacy, which continue to dominate the art system today. He advances the evolution of an art-historical game with the abject and the refined, the origins of which are traceable to the work of artists such as Mike Kelley, Rosemarie Trockel, and Bruce Nauman.
Photo: Sterling Ruby, WIDW. KNACKS. TRIFLES. NOSEGAYS. SWEETMEATS (Detail), 2020, Acrylic, oil, elastic, and cardboard on canvas, framed: 73 ⅞ × 53 ⅞ × 3 ¼ inches / 187.6 × 136.8 × 8.3 cm, © Sterling Ruby, Photo: Robert Wedemeyer, Courtesy the artist and Gagosian
Info: Gagosian Gallery, 22 Anapiron Polemou Street, Athens, Greece, Duration: 13/5-31/7/2021, Days & Hours: Tue-Wed & Fri-Sat 11:00-19:00, Thu 11:00-20:00 (by appointment, book here), https://gagosian.com
