About
Sterling Ruby’s work engages with issues related to the violence and pressures within society, autobiography, and art history. Drawing on diverse aesthetic strategies and mediums—glossy and color-saturated poured-polyurethane sculptures, drawings, collages, richly glazed ceramics, graffiti-inspired spray paintings, and video—he maintains a constant tension within a multitude of elements. Throughout, he vacillates between fluid and static, minimalist and expressionist, pristine and dirty. Of the diverse forms that constitute his oeuvre, the paintings are the most formally abstract. Ruby has long been influenced by the sociological implications of urban demarcation, vandalism, and the power struggles of gang graffiti. In his paintings, acts of defacement are transformed into a painterly sublime.
Ruby was born in 1972 on Bitburg Air Base, Germany. He graduated in 1996 from the Pennsylvania School of Art and Design, Lancaster, and went on to receive a BFA in 2002 from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and an MFA in 2005 from the Art Center College of Design, Pasadena, California. Recent solo exhibitions include CHRON, Drawing Center, New York (2008); SUPERMAX 2008, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2008); Grid Ripper, Galleria d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, Bergamo, Italy (2008–09); SOFT WORK, Centre d’Art Contemporain, Geneva (2012, traveled to FRAC Champagne-Ardenne, France; and Bonniers Konsthall, Stockholm); CHRON II, Fondazione Memmo Arte Contemporanea, Rome (2013, traveled to Kunsthalle Mainz, Germany); DROPPA BLOCKA, Museum Dhondt-Dhaenens, Sint-Martens-Latem, Belgium (2013); Baltimore Museum of Art (2014); STOVES, Musée de la Chasse et de la Nature, Paris (2015); Belvedere Museum, Vienna (2016); and Sterling Ruby: Ceramics, Des Moines Art Center, Iowa (2018, traveling to Museum of Arts and Design, New York). Ruby’s work is featured in museum collections worldwide, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Quebec; Tate, London; Centre Pompidou, Paris; and Moderna Museet, Stockholm.
Ruby participated in the Taipei, Gwangju, South Korea, and Whitney Biennials in 2014; and Made in L.A. 2016: a, the, though, only, the Hammer Museum’s third biennial.
Ruby lives and works in Los Angeles.
#SterlingRuby
From the Quarterly
Fairs, Events & Announcements
Online Viewing Room
Frieze London 2018
October 1–10, 2018
gagosianviewingroom.com
Coinciding with the gallery’s presentations at Frieze London and Frieze Masters, the Online Viewing Room will feature works that will be available exclusively online by artists including Helen Frankenthaler, Roy Lichtenstein, Sterling Ruby, and Jonas Wood.
The Frieze London Online Viewing Room will open at 12:00am on October 1 in Hong Kong, and close at 11:59pm on October 10 in Los Angeles and San Francisco (see below for dates and times in cities where Gagosian has gallery locations).
Online Viewing Room opens:
12:00am HKT on October 1 (Hong Kong)
7:00pm EEST on September 30 (Athens)
6:00pm CEST on September 30 (Geneva, Paris, Rome)
5:00pm BST on September 30 (London)
12:00pm EDT on September 30 (New York)
9:00am PDT on September 30 (Los Angeles, San Francisco)
Online Viewing Room closes:
2:59pm HKT on October 11 (Hong Kong)
9:59am EEST on October 11 (Athens)
8:59am CEST on October 11 (Geneva, Paris, Rome)
7:59am BST on October 11 (London)
2:59am EDT on October 11 (New York)
11:59pm PDT on October 10 (Los Angeles, San Francisco)
For more information about the Frieze London 2018 Online Viewing Room or the works that will be included, please contact inquire@gagosian.com.
Sterling Ruby, WIDW. FLAME WAR., 2018 © Sterling Ruby. Photo: Robert Wedemeyer
Art Fair
Art Basel
June 14–17, 2018
Messe Basel, booth B11
www.artbasel.com
Gagosian is pleased to participate in Art Basel 2018, presenting works by modern and contemporary artists including Georg Baselitz, John Chamberlain, Dan Colen, John Currin, Willem de Kooning, Urs Fischer, Helen Frankenthaler, Ellen Gallagher, Jennifer Guidi, Andreas Gursky, Neil Jenney, Jeff Koons, Roy Lichtenstein, Henri Matisse, Takashi Murakami, Giuseppe Penone, Pablo Picasso, Richard Prince, Sterling Ruby, Richard Serra, Rudolf Stingel, Mark Tansey, Cy Twombly, Andy Warhol, Mary Weatherford, and Tom Wesselmann. To receive a PDF with detailed information on the works, please contact the gallery at inquire@gagosian.com. To preview our booth go to www.artsy.net. To purchase tickets to attend the fair go to www.artbasel.com.
Georg Baselitz, Frau am Strand (Woman on the Beach), 1981 © Georg Baselitz 2018
Art Fair
Artmonte-Carlo
April 28–29, 2018, booth B8
Grimaldi Forum, Monaco
www.artmontecarlo.ch
Gagosian is pleased to participate in Artmonte-Carlo 2018, presenting a selection of works by artists including Richard Artschwager, Davide Balula, Glenn Brown, Michael Craig-Martin, Edmund de Waal, Damien Hirst, Peter Lindbergh, Takashi Murakami & Virgil Abloh, Sterling Ruby, and Taryn Simon. To receive a PDF with detailed information on the works, please contact the gallery at inquire@gagosian.com. To preview our booth go to www.artsy.net. To purchase tickets to attend the fair go to www.artmontecarlo.ch.
Sterling Ruby, Heart (6634), 2018 © Sterling Ruby Studio. Photo: Robert Wedemeyer
Museum Exhibitions
On View
Present Tense
Selections from the Lenhardt Collection
Through December 31, 2018
Phoenix Art Museum
www.phxart.org
Present Tense includes more than twenty paintings, prints, photographs, and sculptures all drawn from the private collection of Dawn and David Lenhardt. The show places recent contemporary acquisitions by the Lenhardts in conversation with works by modern artists. Work by Damien Hirst, Roy Lichtenstein, Sterling Ruby, and Andy Warhol is included.
Sterling Ruby, WIDW. BALLISTIC., 2017 © Sterling Ruby
On View
Sterling Ruby
Ceramics
Through March 17, 2019
Museum of Arts and Design, New York
madmuseum.org
Sterling Ruby’s areas of interest are numerous, but sculptures in clay have long played a fascinating and primary position in his broader studio work. Process and materiality are paramount for Ruby, and using these attributes has enabled him to create an extraordinary body of work that is engaging, intuitive, and subversive. This exhibition has traveled from the Des Moines Art Center.
Sterling Ruby, Brass Ketamine User, 2010 © Sterling Ruby. Photo: Robert Wedemeyer
Opening Soon
West by Midwest
November 17, 2018–January 27, 2019
Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago
mcachicago.org
West by Midwest tells a story that illuminates the ways that contemporary art practices spread and develop by tracing the intersecting lives of artists who have migrated from the American Midwest to the West Coast since the mid-twentieth century. Lured by career opportunities, warmer weather, and the prospect of a better life promised by the postwar boom, those artists who were able to migrate attended art schools together, shared studios, exhibited work in the same galleries, collaborated on projects, engaged in activism, and dated one another. Work by Mike Kelley, Bruce Nauman, Sterling Ruby, and Ed Ruscha is included.
Bruce Nauman, Mold for a Modernized Slant Step, 1966, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago © 2018 Bruce Nauman/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo: Nathan Keay © MCA Chicago
Opening Soon
Dior
From Paris to the World
November 19, 2018–March 3, 2019
denverartmuseum.org
Dior: From Paris to the World surveys seventy years of the House of Dior’s enduring legacy and its global influence. A selection of more than 170 couture dresses, as well as accessories, costume jewelry, photographs, drawings, runway videos, and other archival material, traces the history of the iconic haute couture fashion house. Work by Peter Lindbergh and Sterling Ruby is included.
Peter Lindbergh, Kiara Kabukuru, Debra Shaw, Paris, France, 1997, 1997 © Peter Lindbergh