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Sterling Ruby: The Frenetic Beat
Ester Coen meditates on the dynamism of Sterling Ruby’s recent projects, tracing parallels between these works and the histories of Futurism, Constructivism, and the avant-garde.
I live in the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains and my studio is in downtown Los Angeles. My daily routine of driving back and forth is always a contemplative time. On these drives I often witness extremely vivid and colorful sunrises and sunsets, yielding horizon lines that transform the urban sprawl into a meditative celestial plane.
—Sterling Ruby
Gagosian Hong Kong is pleased to present “VIVIDS,” an exhibition of new spray paintings by Los Angeles-based artist Sterling Ruby. This is Ruby’s first exhibition with the gallery.
Ruby engages a wide range of aesthetic strategies and mediums—glossy and color-saturated poured-polyurethane sculptures, drawings, collages, richly glazed ceramics, graffiti-inspired spray paintings, and video—maintaining a constant tension within a multitude of elements. His work engages with issues related to the violence and pressures within society, autobiography, and art history. 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.
VIVIDS is a new suite of spray paintings in a vibrant, fluorescent pink palette. The resulting electric color fields are Ruby's ruminations on the shifting, multi-hued Los Angeles skies that he encounters en route to his studio. He engages the horizon as his subject using an approximate and speedy medium befitting the gritty urban context, fixing sprays into multiple dimensions alla prima, without pausing for touch-ups or to catch drips. Undelineated forms merge with hazy backgrounds and atmospheric magenta layers, producing meditations of uncontained voltage on an ever-shifting horizon line, which asserts its radiant presence beyond the physical picture plane.
Ester Coen meditates on the dynamism of Sterling Ruby’s recent projects, tracing parallels between these works and the histories of Futurism, Constructivism, and the avant-garde.
Join Sterling Ruby in his Los Angeles studio as he works on new abstract paintings ahead of his exhibition TURBINES at Gagosian in New York.
As spring approaches in the Northern Hemisphere, Sydney Stutterheim reflects on the iconography and symbolism of the season in art both past and present.
Alessandro Rabottini investigates the theoretical and formal underpinnings of Sterling Ruby’s career through the lens of the artist’s series ACTS.
The Fall 2019 issue of Gagosian Quarterly is now available, featuring a detail from Sinking (2019) by Nathaniel Mary Quinn on its cover.
An exhibition at Gagosian, Paris, is raising funds to aid in the reconstruction of the Cathédrale Notre-Dame de Paris following the devastating fire of April 2019. Gagosian directors Serena Cattaneo Adorno and Jean-Olivier Després spoke to Jennifer Knox White about the generous response of artists and others, and what the restoration of this iconic structure means across the world.
Ceramics expert Garth Clark explores Sterling Ruby’s practice in the medium, addressing the work’s allegiances and divergences from tradition.
The Winter 2018 issue of Gagosian Quarterly is now available. Our cover this issue comes from High Times, a new body of work by Richard Prince.
Mario Codognato, curator of the exhibition, discusses Sterling Ruby’s first-ever European survey, at the Belvedere’s Winterpalais galleries.