ART CITIES: N.York-Sterling Ruby

Sterling Ruby’s work engages with issues related to autobiography, art history, and the violence and pressures within society. Employing diverse aesthetic strategies and mediums (including sculpture, drawing, collage, ceramics, painting, and video) he examines the tensions between fluidity and stasis, Expressionism and Minimalism, the abject and the pristine. Living and working in Los Angeles, Ruby draws endless inspiration from the city’s physical and conceptual landscape.

By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Gagosian Archive

Sterling Ruby in his solo exhibition “TURBINES” presents new abstract paintings that represent a convergence of several bodies of work, using different mediums to expand the definitions of painting and collage. Started in 2021, the “TURBINE” series incorporates the same materials that characterize Ruby’s earlier “WIDW” paintings (2016– ) yet abandons their stark vertical divisions in favor of energetic, intersecting diagonals. Making reference not only to turbines and windmills, but also to hurricanes, explosions, fires, war, and geographical boundaries, cardboard components are blasted across the canvas, suggesting that elemental forces are pushing them toward the edges of the frame. Rather than implying the observation of action through a window, the combination of oil paint with bright cardboard swatches is tumultuous, as if a storm has blown the window apart and set its elements in motion. The “TURBINE” paintings are born from Ruby’s desire to make works that are not pictorial, figurative, or didactic, but that still contain recognizable and thought-provoking elements. In its elicitation of speed and devastation and specifically self-destruction, the exhibition inevitably evokes the Futurists and Russian Constructivism. Ruby has cited the influence of various works, including Giacomo Balla’s painting “The Spell Is Broken” (1920) and El Lissitzky’s “Prounenraum”  (1923), which belongs to a series of immersive abstractions that radically reconceive material and space as a metaphor for the societal changes Lissitzky expected from the Russian Revolution. In “TURBINES”, Ruby employs abstraction as a response to contemporary ills, using formal relationships as broad allegories for social and ideological frictions. Ruby makes the series of paintings horizontally, an approach that links them to earlier series such as “BC” (2011–15) and “YD” (2015–16). Borrowing a washing technique he has employed previously in producing textile works, the artist overdyes the canvases in luminous colors before using them to cover his studio floor and allowing them to become crisscrossed by footprints and other marks.

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, TURBINE. EXIT NEXT., 2022, Acrylic, oil, and cardboard on canvas, 96 × 126 inches (243.8 × 320 cm), © Sterling Ruby. Photo: Robert Wedemeyer, courtesy the artist and Gagosian

Info: Gagosian Gallery, 522 West 21st Street, New York, NY, USA, Duration: 10/11-23/12/2022, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, https://gagosian.com/