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Sterling Ruby

ACTS + TABLE

October 2–December 14, 2019
Britannia Street, London

Installation video Play Button

Installation video

Installation view Artwork © Sterling Ruby. Photo: Lucy Dawkins

Installation view

Artwork © Sterling Ruby. Photo: Lucy Dawkins

Installation view Artwork © Sterling Ruby. Photo: Lucy Dawkins

Installation view

Artwork © Sterling Ruby. Photo: Lucy Dawkins

Installation view Artwork © Sterling Ruby. Photo: Lucy Dawkins

Installation view

Artwork © Sterling Ruby. Photo: Lucy Dawkins

Installation view Artwork © Sterling Ruby. Photo: Lucy Dawkins

Installation view

Artwork © Sterling Ruby. Photo: Lucy Dawkins

Installation view with Sterling Ruby, TABLE (DOUBLE LAST SUPPER) (2019) Artwork © Sterling Ruby. Photo: Lucy Dawkins

Installation view with Sterling Ruby, TABLE (DOUBLE LAST SUPPER) (2019)

Artwork © Sterling Ruby. Photo: Lucy Dawkins

Installation view Artwork © Sterling Ruby. Photo: Lucy Dawkins

Installation view

Artwork © Sterling Ruby. Photo: Lucy Dawkins

Installation view Artwork © Sterling Ruby. Photo: Lucy Dawkins

Installation view

Artwork © Sterling Ruby. Photo: Lucy Dawkins

Works Exhibited

Sterling Ruby, ACTS/OSIRIS-REx, 2016 Clear urethane blocks, dye, wood, spray paint, and laminate, 66 ½ × 175 ⅛ × 35 inches (168.9 × 444.8 × 88.9 cm)© Sterling Ruby. Photo: Robert Wedemeyer

Sterling Ruby, ACTS/OSIRIS-REx, 2016

Clear urethane blocks, dye, wood, spray paint, and laminate, 66 ½ × 175 ⅛ × 35 inches (168.9 × 444.8 × 88.9 cm)
© Sterling Ruby. Photo: Robert Wedemeyer

Sterling Ruby, ACTS/OSIRIS-REx, 2016 (detail) Clear urethane blocks, dye, wood, spray paint, and laminate, 66 ½ × 175 ⅛ × 35 inches (168.9 × 444.8 × 88.9 cm)© Sterling Ruby. Photo: Robert Wedemeyer

Sterling Ruby, ACTS/OSIRIS-REx, 2016 (detail)

Clear urethane blocks, dye, wood, spray paint, and laminate, 66 ½ × 175 ⅛ × 35 inches (168.9 × 444.8 × 88.9 cm)
© Sterling Ruby. Photo: Robert Wedemeyer

Sterling Ruby, ACTS/PROXIMA, 2018 Clear urethane blocks, dye, wood, spray paint, and laminate, 66 ½ × 175 ½ × 35 ⅛ inches (168.9 × 445.8 × 89.2 cm)© Sterling Ruby. Photo: Robert Wedemeyer

Sterling Ruby, ACTS/PROXIMA, 2018

Clear urethane blocks, dye, wood, spray paint, and laminate, 66 ½ × 175 ½ × 35 ⅛ inches (168.9 × 445.8 × 89.2 cm)
© Sterling Ruby. Photo: Robert Wedemeyer

Sterling Ruby, ACTS/PROXIMA, 2018 (detail) Clear urethane blocks, dye, wood, spray paint, and laminate, 66 ½ × 175 ½ × 35 ⅛ inches (168.9 × 445.8 × 89.2 cm)© Sterling Ruby. Photo: Robert Wedemeyer

Sterling Ruby, ACTS/PROXIMA, 2018 (detail)

Clear urethane blocks, dye, wood, spray paint, and laminate, 66 ½ × 175 ½ × 35 ⅛ inches (168.9 × 445.8 × 89.2 cm)
© Sterling Ruby. Photo: Robert Wedemeyer

Sterling Ruby, ACTS/PRAYING MANTLE, 2015 Clear urethane blocks, dye, wood, spray paint, and laminate, 66 ½ × 174 ⅛ × 35 ⅛ inches (168.9 × 442.3 × 89.2 cm)© Sterling Ruby. Photo: Robert Wedemeyer

Sterling Ruby, ACTS/PRAYING MANTLE, 2015

Clear urethane blocks, dye, wood, spray paint, and laminate, 66 ½ × 174 ⅛ × 35 ⅛ inches (168.9 × 442.3 × 89.2 cm)
© Sterling Ruby. Photo: Robert Wedemeyer

Sterling Ruby, ACTS/ROBITUSSIN, 2016 Clear urethane blocks, dye, wood, spray paint, and laminate, 66 ½ × 175 ⅜ × 35 ⅛ inches (168.9 × 445.5 × 89.2 cm)© Sterling Ruby. Photo: Robert Wedemeyer

Sterling Ruby, ACTS/ROBITUSSIN, 2016

Clear urethane blocks, dye, wood, spray paint, and laminate, 66 ½ × 175 ⅜ × 35 ⅛ inches (168.9 × 445.5 × 89.2 cm)
© Sterling Ruby. Photo: Robert Wedemeyer

Sterling Ruby, ACTS/ROBITUSSIN, 2016 (detail) Clear urethane blocks, dye, wood, spray paint, and laminate, 66 ½ × 175 ⅜ × 35 ⅛ inches (168.9 × 445.5 × 89.2 cm)© Sterling Ruby. Photo: Robert Wedemeyer

Sterling Ruby, ACTS/ROBITUSSIN, 2016 (detail)

Clear urethane blocks, dye, wood, spray paint, and laminate, 66 ½ × 175 ⅜ × 35 ⅛ inches (168.9 × 445.5 × 89.2 cm)
© Sterling Ruby. Photo: Robert Wedemeyer

Sterling Ruby, TABLE (DOUBLE LAST SUPPER), 2019 Cast iron, brass, and steel, 66 × 348 × 56 inches (167.6 × 883.9 × 142.2 cm)© Sterling Ruby. Photo: Robert Wedemeyer

Sterling Ruby, TABLE (DOUBLE LAST SUPPER), 2019

Cast iron, brass, and steel, 66 × 348 × 56 inches (167.6 × 883.9 × 142.2 cm)
© Sterling Ruby. Photo: Robert Wedemeyer

Sterling Ruby, TABLE (DOUBLE LAST SUPPER), 2019 (detail) Cast iron, brass, and steel, 66 × 348 × 56 inches (167.6 × 883.9 × 142.2 cm)© Sterling Ruby. Photo: Robert Wedemeyer

Sterling Ruby, TABLE (DOUBLE LAST SUPPER), 2019 (detail)

Cast iron, brass, and steel, 66 × 348 × 56 inches (167.6 × 883.9 × 142.2 cm)
© Sterling Ruby. Photo: Robert Wedemeyer

Sterling Ruby, TABLE (DOUBLE LAST SUPPER), 2019 (detail) Cast iron, brass, and steel, 66 × 348 × 56 inches (167.6 × 883.9 × 142.2 cm)© Sterling Ruby. Photo: Robert Wedemeyer

Sterling Ruby, TABLE (DOUBLE LAST SUPPER), 2019 (detail)

Cast iron, brass, and steel, 66 × 348 × 56 inches (167.6 × 883.9 × 142.2 cm)
© Sterling Ruby. Photo: Robert Wedemeyer

About

I use many different media as a kind of schizophrenic labor strategy. It seems very easy now to say it, but it has taken me years to convey that this scattered routine belongs within a coherent trajectory. . . . There is a lineage that links everything that I do together.
—Sterling Ruby

Gagosian is pleased to present sculptures by Sterling Ruby at Britannia Street. This is his first solo exhibition with the gallery in London. On view will be works from two series, ACTS (2006–18) and TABLES (2015–19).

In an oeuvre spanning sculpture, ceramics, painting, drawing, collage, video, and garments, Ruby continually returns to themes of societal and art historical friction, generating feelings of anxiety and agitation by contrasting clean lines and recognizable objects with coarse and uncanny forms. ACTS + TABLE lays out Ruby’s critique of the authoritarian, exclusionary ideological underpinnings of Minimalism. He begins with familiar shapes valued by the Minimalists—simple tables and rectilinear blocks—but subverts them by defacing their smooth surfaces and exposing their physical means of production.

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News

Helen Frankenthaler, Distant Barrier, 1992 © 2020 Helen Frankenthaler Foundation, Inc./Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Art Fair

Art Basel Miami Beach Online

Gagosian Online
November 29–December 7, 2020
Presented in four forty-eight-hour cycles
gagosian.com

OVR: Miami Beach 
VIP preview: December 2–4, 2020
Public viewing: December 4–6, 2020
artbasel.com

On the occasion of Art Basel Miami Beach 2020, which was canceled this year due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Gagosian is pleased to present works by modern and contemporary masters on two concurrent online platforms: Gagosian Online, which will feature four individually curated groupings of artworks in forty-eight-hour cycles, and OVR: Miami Beach.

Helen Frankenthaler, Distant Barrier, 1992 © 2020 Helen Frankenthaler Foundation, Inc./Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Sterling Ruby: ACTS + TABLES (London: Gagosian, 2019)

Online Reading

Sterling Ruby
ACTS + TABLES

Sterling Ruby: ACTS + TABLES is available for online reading from August 23 through September 21 as part of the From the Library series. Comprising two books housed in a slipcase, ACTS + TABLES was produced on the occasion of the Ruby’s 2019 exhibition at Gagosian, Britannia Street, London. One volume is dedicated to the ACTS series and the other to the TABLES series. In ACTS—whose title is short for “Absolute Contempt for Total Serenity”—Ruby captures liquid dye inside clear urethane and balances these pure prisms atop scuffed, inscribed, and spray-painted laminate-clad bases. The exhibition also includes TABLE (DOUBLE LAST SUPPER) (2019), the culminating work of Ruby’s TABLES, a series that explores the concept of personal and cultural archaeology. The book features a two-part essay by curator and critic Jenelle Porter and is designed by Purtill Family Business.

Sterling Ruby: ACTS + TABLES (London: Gagosian, 2019)

Sterling Ruby, Dihedral, 2006 (still) © Sterling Ruby

Screening

Sterling Ruby
Dihedral

November 27–30, 2019
Gagosian, Britannia Street, London

Join Gagosian for a special screening of Sterling Ruby’s Dihedral (2006) on the occasion of the exhibition ACTS + TABLE, on view through December 14In the short video, a voice-over intones a modified quote from sociologist Roger Caillois’s surrealist etymological text, “Mimicry and Legendary Psychasthenia,” as waves of color encounter a clear liquid. Dihedral illustrates the process that is captured in Ruby’s ACTS series, in which liquid dye is fixed inside clear urethane blocks. The film will be screened during gallery opening hours, from 10am to 6pm. The event is free and open to the public.

Sterling Ruby, Dihedral, 2006 (still) © Sterling Ruby

Installation view, Sterling Ruby: ACTS + TABLE, Gagosian, Britannia Street, London, October 2–December 14, 2019. Artwork © Sterling Ruby. Photo: Lucy Dawkins

Tour

Sterling Ruby
ACTS + TABLE

Thursday, November 7, 2019, 6:15pm
Gagosian, Britannia Street, London

Join Gagosian for a tour of Sterling Ruby: ACTS + TABLE, currently on view at Britannia Street, London, led by Serena Cattaneo Adorno, Gagosian director, and Alessandro Rabottini, director of Miart, International Fair of Modern and Contemporary Art. The works in the show lay out Ruby’s critique of the authoritarian, exclusionary ideological underpinnings of Minimalism. He begins with familiar shapes valued by the Minimalists—simple tables and rectilinear blocks—but subverts them by defacing their smooth surfaces and exposing their physical means of production. The event has reached capacity. To join the wait list, contact londontours@gagosian.com

Installation view, Sterling Ruby: ACTS + TABLE, Gagosian, Britannia Street, London, October 2–December 14, 2019. Artwork © Sterling Ruby. Photo: Lucy Dawkins