Sterling Ruby American, b. 1972
Overview
BC (3739), 2012
“I’m interested in leaving room for ‘failure’, so that a work can wind up becoming something completely different from the intentions I started out with.” — STERLING RUBY
American artist Sterling Ruby works in a large variety of media, including sculpture, ceramics, painting, and video art. Ruby is influenced by a wide range of sources, including marginalized societies, maximum-security prisons, modernist architecture, artefacts and antiquities, graffiti, waste and consumption, and urban gangs. Through these, he examines the psychological space where individual expression confronts social constraint.
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.
Ruby received his BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago before pursuing an MFA at the ArtCenter College of Design. He has exhibited in New York, London, Berlin, Los Angeles, Paris, and Tokyo, and has collaborated with designer Raf Simons for brands including Calvin Klein, Christian Dior, and Simons’s eponymous label.
Works
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BC (3739), 2012 -
BC (3863), 2012
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SP 149, 2010
Exhibitions
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LEVEL PART II
Laffanour Galerie Downtown Paris 3 - 26 Oct 2024Laffanour | Galerie Downtown is delighted to unveil the exhibition “LEVEL Part II”, inRead more
collaboration with Charles Riva Collection and François Laffanour and collector and curator Charles Riva bring together contemporary artworks by international artists with iconic pieces by 20th-century designers during Art Basel Paris -
Sterling Ruby, Selected Works
Brussels 18 Apr - 13 Oct 2013Ruby’s critique of minimalism and its repressive and rigid lines have resulted in his exploitation of the limitations of form, scale and materials. His highly diverse works unapologetically deal with...Read more
